Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder. One of the few drugs used to treat AD is memantine, which inhibits N-methyl-d-aspartate receptors (NMDARs), glutamate receptor subtypes found at nearly all vertebrate excitatory synapses. NMDARs are critically involved in many aspects of nervous system function, including learning and me ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The major barriers limiting the application of MRI to detect small liver lesions and metastasis at the early stage and patient selection for targeted therapy based on molecular imaging of disease biomarkers, are due tothe lack of desired MRI contrast agents capable of enhancing the contrast between normal liver tissues and tumors with high relaxivity, tumor tar ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the United States with some sub-types remaining essentially untreatable, expansion of available drug targets will provide significant new options for the development ofmore effective antineoplastic agents. The major goal of this project is to apply a unique drug discovery strategy to cancer drug development. Th ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Clostridium difficile (CD) is a bacterium causing diarrhea and other intestinal problems linked to 14,000 annual deaths in the US. CDI is an antibiotic-associated infection as well as a health-care-associated infection.Current CDI diagnosis relies on CD toxins enzyme immunoassay (EIA) together with antigen (GDH) EIA. Although stool toxin EIA is specific and rel ...

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): NMR is probably the most powerful and widely used analytical technique for structure determination and function elucidation of molecules of all types, but it suffers from low sensitivity, particularly for insoluble biological macromolecules. Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) with Magic Angle Spinning (MAS) has recently demonstrated S/N gains exceeding t ...

DESCRIPTION: While HIV/AIDS can be managed with antiretroviral drugs that block viral replication, these agents do not clear the virus and require life-long drug administration with associated risks of cumulative toxicity and drug resistance. Recently, wediscovered a completely new class of compounds that interfere with the HIV-1 virulence factor, Nef. This viral protein is critical to HIV-1 repli ...

We have discovered the first-ever inhibitors of PF4, a platelet protein central to the pathophysiology of heparin induced thrombocytopenia (HIT). Heparin is a naturally-occurring anticoagulant that prevents the formation of clots and extension of existingclots within the vasculature, and major medical applications of heparin include dialysis, cardiac catheterization, and cardiopulmonary bypass sur ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long term goal of the proposed project by Smart Activities of Daily Living, LLC (Smart ADLs) is to develop a device (the Smart Cup) that will improve the health of older adults by managing nutrition using smart health technology. Malnutrition (under nutrition) is a common geriatric syndrome found in older adults across the care continuum. Older adults accou ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our goal is to create a compact, affordable, fully automated, screening system for large-scale drug 2 testing in living small animal disease models (e.g., worms, flies, and fish). Modern drug discovery is 3 driven by high-throughput screening (HTS) systems that have the capacity to evaluate large chemical 4 compound 'libraries'. The majority of hits ...

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant One of the challenges of research in infectious diseases is to find ways to use the increasing knowledge of the mechanisms underlying disease transformation and progression to develop novel therapeutic strategies for diseases such as increasing menace of bacterial infections Targeting specific RNA such as rRNA which are involved in proliferation and survival ...