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: Plants produce a wide variety of valuable bioactive metabolites, but these are commonly present in low concentrations in the wild-type plant. This makes the separation and purification of these compounds complicated and expensive. The applicant company, Naprogenix Inc, has developed a technology for increasing the yields of specific bioactive metabolites in mutant plant cell cultures ...

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): Obesity is recognized as a national and global epidemic, as approximately 65% of adults in the United States are classified as overweight or obese as defined by body mass index (BMI). In fact, in the year 2000, the human race reached a historical landmark, when for the first time in history the number of adults with excess weight surpassed the number of those w ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Due to its asymptomatic nature and lack of methods for early detection, gt 80% of pancreatic cancer (PC) patients present with an unresectable primary tumor with distant metastasis at the time of diagnosis. While the overall 5 year survival rate of pancreatic cancer is dismal, significantly better outcomes have been reported for smaller tumors detected at an e ...

? 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 (provided by applicant): The long-term objective of this STTR project is to commercialize the protein multi-blot Western device, which contributes to improving the productivity and accuracy of conventional Western blot analysis. Although Western blotting has been used for more than three decades, this labor-and-cost demanding technique remains a key routine for a majority of life scien ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): People with traumatic brain injury (TBI) are often plagued with socio-emotional deficits that include difficulty identifying emotions in oneself (alexithymia), difficulty recognizing other peoples' emotions (impaired affect recognition), and empathy loss. These highly prevalent deficits, ranging between 39-70% of the moderate to severe TBI population, are ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The broad and long-term objective of this research project is to use, develop and market an instrument for the simultaneous recording of sympathetic nerve activity (SNA) and electrocardiogram (ECG) using electrodes on the skin. This method (neuECG) was discovered in Dr. Chen's research laboratory at the Krannert Institute of Cardiology, and a patent applic ...