Award Data

There are currently no vaccines or therapeutics available for Marburg Virus Disease (MVD). Given the specter of weaponization and the terrible morbidity and high mortality rate of MVD, this represents a critical threat to the operational readiness of the Warfighter. While traditional vaccines have contributed greatly to public health, they have some limitations especially in the context of operati ...

Through this STTR contract, we propose to evaluate the efficacy of our vaccine, FlowVax Marburg, in nonhuman primates (NHPs). This will be achieved through four Tasks. In Task 1, we will manufacture the vaccine in a quantity sufficient for the animal studies. In Task 2, we will perform MHC genotyping on a representative population of NHPs and, based on results, select a set of MHC-matched NHPs for ...

Improving the effectiveness of counter-WMD operations requires improved understanding of weapon-target interaction. Specifically, time-resolved measurements of temperature and composition are required to allow temporal evolution of a detonation fireball. To address this need, SA Photonics will develop MONITOR, a laser-based temperature diagnostic that will enable wide dynamic range temperature mea ...

Current state-of-the-art object detection algorithms are almost exclusively based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). These algorithms all require a large amount of labeled examples for each of the object categories they can recognize. These algorithms will fail for novel objects that only very few or even no prior examples are available. These algorithms are also far less accurate when c ...

NanoSD, Inc. with its partners will develop a transparent, nanostructured thermally insulating film that can be applied to existing single-pane windows to reduce heat loss. To produce the nanostructured film, the team will create hollow ceramic or polymer nanobubbles and consolidate them into a dense lattice structure using heat and compression. Because it is mostly air, the resulting nanobubble s ...

Nalas Engineering and Johns Hopkins University collaborated in a Phase I STTR program to study reactive mixtures of HI3O8 and nanocomposite fuels previously developed by the Weihs Group. These fuel/oxidizer mixtures are uniquely able to simultaneously produce heat and biocidal iodine gas, a combination designed to destroy biological weapons. The team at Nalas focused on evaluating conditions for p ...

The discovery and commercial development of licensed vaccines often take many years of research followed by years of pre-clinical and clinical development. We propose to assess the feasibility of using a novel irradiation-inactivation technology to develop vaccines more rapidly. The technology utilizes a manganese-peptide complex to protect antigenic proteins from ionizing radiation while allowing ...

Compact Electromagnetic Pulse Module (EMP) capable of being arranged in series-parallel planar or cylindrical arrays is needed to simulate nuclear weapon effects. High gain optically triggered photoconductive semiconductor switches (PCSS) based on Gallium arsenide (GaAs) with low timing jitter enables the development of planar or phased arrays of modular EMP or High Power Microwave (HPM) sources. ...

A compact laser driver will allow photoconductive semiconductor switches to be used in small EMP simulator "building blocks" (EMPBB). Combined with a battery powered on-board pulsed power system, these EMPBBs will allow the construction of flexible EMP test facilities with nothing more than a single fiber optic timing connection to each EMPBB.

This program will demonstrate how additive manufacturing technologies can be used with reactive and high energy materials to create rapid and flexible fabrication of payload and munitions. Our primary approach to this problem will be to use powder bed binder printing techniques to print reactive structures. The anticipated feedstock will consist of composite particles containing all reactant spe ...