Award Data

Obstetricians measure fetal heartrate (FHR) and uterine contractions to evaluate fetal health during pregnancy and labor. This monitoring is performed to decrease the development of complications while minimizing the need for unnecessary obstetric interventions and is especially important for women with high-risk pregnancies. However, many women, especially in rural areas, do not have the time or ...

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Lack of exercise is a major cause of secondary health conditions, especially for people with paralysis, for whom participation in physical activity is especially difficult. Hybrid functional electrical stimulation (H- FES) exercise enables vigorous, total body physical activity for people with paralysis. However, existing H-FES devices are neither affordable nor accessible ...

ABSTRACT: Cutaneous vascular malformations (CVM), such as port wine stain (PWS) which occurs in 0.3–0.5% of newborns, are often a cause of great concern to patients for both medical and cosmetic reasons. Laser irradiation with flashlamp-pumped pulsed dye lasers, i.e. photothermolysis therapy (PTT), is currently the gold standard treatment for PWS. Most patients with PWS, however, fail to clear c ...

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 ...

PROJECT SUMMARY The ability of dying cells to activate antigen presenting cells (APCs) is carefully controlled to avoid unwarranted inflammatory responses. Thus, tumor cells avoid aggravating APCs by efficiently simulating regular dying cells which following phagocytosis do not trigger inflammatory responses required for efficient cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) priming. However, dying tumor cells co ...

Project Abstract An estimated 5.7 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia (ADRD) and one in ten people age 65 or older show symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. As ADRD progresses so does the level of dependency on others. As the disease progresses, higher levels of dependence in people with Alzheimer’s disease are associated with significantly increased burden and costs ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Understanding of tumor molecular characteristics during a course of radiotherapy (RT) treatment is crucial to assess the efficacy of the treatment and adapt radiation dosage to optimize outcomes. Unfortunately, this cannot be routinely achieved by current diagnostic nuclear imaging modalities due to complex logistics and prohibitive costs. Alternatively, Cerenkov Emission (CE) is a ...

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The recent groundbreaking experiment using a single neutralizing monoclonal antibody (nmAb) to reduce the death rate in Ebola virus (EBOV)-infected individuals highlights the importance of this class of drug in the treatment of infectious disease. In August 2019, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that administration of mAb114 had reduced the death rate from 70% to approximately ...

The US population at large, and particularly military personnel and first responders, are at risk of radiation exposure due to the explosion of a nuclear device, a nuclear reactor accident, and the threat of radiation terror- ism. There is no radiation medical countermeasure (RCM) drug approved by the FDA that meets the criterion of a gastrointestinal (GI) radiomitigator – an agent which mitigat ...

Abstract The 90 kD heat shock proteins (Hsp90) are molecular chaperones that are responsible for the folding of select proteins, many of which are directly associated with cancer progression. Consequently, inhibition of the Hsp90 protein folding machinery results in a combinatorial attack on numerous oncogenic pathways. Seventeen small molecule inhibitors of Hsp90 have entered clinical trials for ...