Award Data

Research Summary: The KRAS proto-oncogene is one of the most critical genes in cancer, yet it has also proven to be among the most elusive. Nearly all (98%) of KRAS missense mutations occur in codons 12 or 13, which leads to constitutive KRAS activation and promotion of numerous cancer hallmarks. Although kinase inhibitors have revolutionized treatment of some subsets of cancers driven by other mo ...

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) affects ~15-50 individuals per million and claims ≥20,000 lives annually in the United States. It affects every ethnic group, race, age and gender, and devastates high-risk patients afflicted with HIV, systemic sclerosis, and sickle cell disease. The disease affects more women than men; adult PAH patients do not live more than five years after the diagnosis. ...

ABSTRACT Microscale simulations have been applied to a number of complex microfluidic systems and biological applications, but existing methods are limited in the scale and scope of problems that are addressable. Thermodynamically constrained averaging theory (TCAT) is an established approach that can be used to formulate customized macroscale models that are consistent with microscale physics and ...

Project Summary NeuroGT, Inc is a new start-up company founded by Dr. Haiyan Fu, Associate professor in the Gene Therapy Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the mission of develop and commercialize effective gene therapy products to treat rare neurogenetic diseases in humans. The goal of this project is to develop an effective gene therapy product targeting the root cause f ...

Contact PD/PI: GILGER, BRIAN C Abstract Corneal blindness is a leading cause of global blindness, with allogeneic corneal transplantation (CT) being the most common form of tissue transplantation worldwide. Though approximately 180,000 CT surgeries are carried out each year, around 12.7 million are currently awaiting a donor cornea to undergo the operation. Still, CT surgery is accompanied by a hi ...

PROJECT SUMMARYSepsis is a life-threatening syndrome that involves a systemic inflammatory response that is initiated by an infection. There are an estimated 1.5 million of cases annually in the US with 250,000 resulting in death. The number of cases and associated deaths is expected to increase given the rising at-risk population of elderly individuals and the compounding challenge of antibiotic ...

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Autonomic dysreflexia (AD) is a potentially life-threatening hypertensive crisis that predominantly affects individuals with a spinal cord injury (SCI) above T6. AD can be triggered idiopathically or by distention or manipulation of pelvic visceral organs, especially the bladder and bowel, which can occur with catheterization and fecal evacuation procedures that are necess ...

Project Summary Natural products have served as a productive source of drugs over the past decades and have represented, or been the inspiration for, a majority of antimicrobial compounds that have entered the clinic. The goal of this proposal is to develop novel antibacterial adjuvants based on the marine natural product synoxazolidinone B to treat Gram-positive orthopedic joint infections. These ...

We recently developed a technology that combines catalytically inactive dCas9 with bifunctional chemicals that link endogenous host cellular machinery to specific genes targeted with dCas9. We have demonstrated this technology can significantly increase gene expression at multiple endogenous mammalian genes in a chemically dependent manner. Here we propose to apply this technology to the mono-alle ...

PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT The goal of this project is to demonstrate the feasibility of a novel technology that is expected to boost yields from pharmaceutical industrial insulin production by greater than four-fold over conventional methods. Higher yields will lower production costs, generating savings that will ultimately be passed onto the millions of diabetic patients who require daily insuli ...