Award Data

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): The longterm goal of this project is to utilize cytomegalovirus (CMV) vectors in the development of a therapeutic vaccine against herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2), the causative agent of genital herpes. HSV-2 is widely prevalent in the population causing recurrent genital lesions and significantly increasing the risk for other sexually transmitted diseases such a ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): AuraSense Therapeutics (AST), along with Northwestern University, is applying a recently developed technology using oligonucleotide-functionalized nanoparticles (called spherical nucleic acids or SNAs) to control protein expression. These easily synthesized nanoparticles can have either DNA or RNA shells, and are less than 50 nm in hydrodynamic diameter. SNA co ...

Project Summary The goal of this STTR grant application is to engineer powerful NK cell-based cytolytic effector cells for therapeutic applications. The cells will combine the selectivity and specificity of T cells and the ability of NK cells to mediate effective cytolytic activity against a wide spectrum of aberrant cells, including those with impaired adhesion properties. To achieve this goal we ...

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): Genomic instability is a hallmark of cancer, yet is underdeveloped as a therapeutic target area The central goal of this program is to develop new cancer therapeutics that target genomic instability as a hallmark of cancer cells, bringing new, cancer-cell selective treatments to the clinical oncology market. Two key challenges in current cancer therapy are mini ...

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Poor prognosis cancers such as lung cancer, glioblastoma, pancreatic cancer and others have 3 year survival rates that range from 1%-15%. Recent advancements in the development of therapeutic antibodies haveshown promise in other cancers such as breast, head and neck, and colon cancer. The limitations in antibody development are the paucity of cancer ...

? 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): Oral disease is a silent epidemic because of its prevalence and missed prevention opportunities. Evidence has established connections between oral-systemic etiologies, including the effects of periodontal disease (PD), and a range of health outcomes and co-morbidities across the lifecourse (e.g., adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes; early childhood carries; ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A hallmark of virtually every cancer is aberrant epigenetic silencing of vital genes required for a normal cell cycle and genome stability (e.g. MLH1, BRCA1, VHL, p16, etc.). Loss of expression of these tumor suppressorgenes plays a critical role in cancer formation and growth. Thus, targeting this root cause of cancer has significant potential to treat and pot ...