Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Cationic lipid-like compounds are commonly used in vitro and in vivo to deliver DNA to cells for the purposes of expressing exogenous genes. A number of clinical trials have indicated the promise of these agents for gene therapy, however lipid-based delivery remains less effective than the alternative viral vectors. Nevertheless, vast improvements have been mad ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Significant progress has been made in the science of electrocardiography since 1938. Heart rate and biophysical profiles are routinely derived from multi-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) in animals and humans after birth. In contrast, only limited heart monitoring technologies exist for the fetus. Moreover, available technology fails to satisfy many existing need ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Back pain afflicts over 75% of Americans during their lifetime and 2% of the American work force suffers a back injury on the job each year. Spinal fusion is the orthopedic procedure routinely used to treat back pain in patients suffering from degenerative disc disease, spinal stenosis, scoliosis, and spinal fracture; however, procedure failure rates range betw ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of this project is to develop a novel method for MRI quantification of postinfarct myocardial viability. Ultimately, the commercial embodiment of this method will be a software package that will convert a set of 2D cardiac MRI images to a 3D Myocardial Viability Map (MV) with a voxel-by-voxel resolution. In human clinical use, the package woul ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to develop a general method of improving the stability and durability of enzymes used in DNA and RNA amplification, sequencing, restriction analysis and ligation. The enzymes to be improved include DNA polymerases, topoisomerases, reverse transcriptases and ligases. In the event this goal can be achieved, broad impacts may result in ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Psoriasis is a common immune-mediated disease that affects approximately 2% of the US and European populations and significantly impacts the quality of life. T cells are recognized as primary mediators of the disease and new generation therapies aimed at eliminating reactive T cells or interfering with the immunologic cascade caused by their activation have bee ...

Loss of vestibular hair cells can occur due to a variety of disorders and results in dysfunction of the vestibulo-occular reflex and loss of balance. Bilateral vestibular hypofunction due to aminoglycoside ototoxicity and other means is a devastating and currently untreatable chronic disorder because loss of vestibular hair cells is permanent. To date there is no prosthetic device such as a hearin ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Efficiency of hemodialysis is currently limited by dialyzer technology. Although new membranes with large surface areas have been developed, the increase in delivered treatment is only marginal. Double dialyzer therapies have been shown to be superior to standard high efficiency/ high flux dialysis treatments; however implementation of double dialyzer therapi ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Diabetic bladder dysfunction (DBD) or diabetic cystopathy is one of the most common and debilitating complications of diabetes mellitus (DM) affecting well over 50% of the patients with either type I or type II diabetes. DBD could affect both the filling and voiding function of the bladder leading to urinary incontinence, poor emptying, high post void residual ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recurrent spontaneous abortion (RSA) is a serious medical condition that affects approximately 1-3% of reproductive age women. At present, there is no FDA approved treatment for RSA. We hypothesize that failure to suppress Th1 cytokine production early in pregnancy is a major cause of RSA. We hypothesize that recombinant human granulocyte colony stimulating fa ...