Award Data

ABSTRACT This Phase STTR Phase II proposal aims to engineer and scale-up a synthetic metabolic pathway in a microbial host to produce UDCA and related compounds. Additionally, the UDCA produced from the engineered synthetic metabolic pathway will be used to synthesize derivatives for testing in our Alzheimer’s Disease cell and animal models. The proposed work has high intellectual merit for the ...

Abstract Increases in life expectancy together with demographic trends have fueled a rapid increase in America’s elderly population. As the number of older Americans has grown, so has the prevalence of aging-associated diseases, including Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and other related dementias (ADRD). An estimated 5.4 Million Americans had AD in 2012, and that number is expected to double by 2030 ...

PROJECT SUMMARY We propose to develop a novel non-contact, label-free multimodality imager that provides real-time intraoperative identification of nerves within the surgical field-of-view to facilitate the prevention of unintended nerve damage (termed iatrogenic nerve injury) during surgical procedures, as they are a major source of postsurgical complications, e.g., chronic pain. In the United St ...

ABSTRACT MarPam Pharma is developing a one-time treatment for durable remission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) for patients treated with antiretroviral therapy (ART). This treatment is an autologous HIV-specific chimeric antigen receptor (CAR; specifically, CD4-MBL-CAR) T cell therapy that employs the CXCR5 chemokine receptor as a homing device to direct anti-HIV killer T cells into “hidd ...

PROJECT SUMMARY This proposal responds to PAR-18-870 titled “BRAIN Initiative: Development Optimization, and Validation of Novel Tools and Technologies for Neuroscience Research (STTR).” This project is a Fast Track STTR with a phase I and phase II. The small business, Applied Universal Dynamics Corp. (AUD) is collaborating with the University of Minnesota (U of MN). The activity patterns of t ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Despite a growing need for smoking cessation services, Latino smokers face notable disparities in cessation treatment. Consequently, there is a big opportunity, both from a scientific and a business perspective, to develop and test the most optimal culturally tailored approaches to enroll and engage Latino Smokers into cessation programs. The Kick Buts program owned by Agile Health ...

ABSTRACT Leptomeningeal Metastases (LM) is a condition in which tumor cells from a primary tumor metastasize, invade the subarachnoid space (SAS) and spread throughout the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), resulting in seeding along the meninges, brain and spinal cord. LM represents a devastating event of cancer progression. There are 30,000 cases annually and currently no cure, with average survival of ...

ABSTRACT When Cryptococcus is manifested as cryptococcal meningitis (CM), it creates a large burden of mortality and morbidity to the patient and is very difficult for the clinician to treat. There are now an estimated 2600-7800 US cases and 400,000 cases of CM worldwide annually, with estimated mortality of 15-50% per year. CM is caused when Cryptococcus neoformans, a basidiomycete fungal pathoge ...

This project will develop a Socially-Assistive Robot (SAR) to provide cognitive training, in the form of learning to play the piano, to improve cognitive functioning and reduce feelings of loneliness in socially-isolated older adults. The SAR will administer cognitive training via guided practice on a set of standard piano lesson tasks designed to reflect particular cognitive functions: memory, at ...

The Bumps: A Device for Rapid, Non-Invasive Quantification of Touch Sensation Abstract !Our proposal describes an elegant device called the Bumps that quantifies finger pad touch sensation at low micron levels. The objectives are to diagnose peripheral neuropathy near its onset, when the possibility for reversal is highest, and to monitor either progression or reversal of neuropathy during treatme ...