Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Over 60,000 prosthetic grafts, which are primarily comprised of polyethylene terephthalate (polyester) or expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE), are implanted in the United States each year. Unfortunately, these grafts continue to have high failure rates due to secondary complications associated with acute thromboses and incomplete, unregulated cellular prol ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Common acoustic environments are often complex mixtures of sounds from multiple acoustic sources. Some of these sources contain critical information listeners need to comprehend; others are distractions that interfere with listeners6 comprehension. As the US population ages, a significant and growing segment have difficulty coping with such complex sound fi ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Substance abuse treatment is often complicated by problems such as depression, family and interpersonal conflicts, and legal issues. When these issues are addressed with effective, evidence-based treatments (EBTs), outcomes improve. To improve the quality of addiction treatment, experts have called for the adoption of a continuing care management approach, invo ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In comparison to standard x-ray therapy, proton therapy allows an increased dose of radiation to a tumor and by reducing the amount of radiation to healthy tissue. As a result, it provides the best possible option for using radiation to control and eliminate tumors with the least short and long term toxic side effects. Currently less than 1% of all radiation th ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our goal is to provide neurologists and other clinicians a method for the rapid, painless, non-invasive evaluation of children with neuromuscular disease. Pediatric neuromuscular disorders include muscular dystrophies, spinal muscular atrophy, and inflammatory myositis, and affect well over 100,000 children in the United States alone. Present-day clinical m ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The underground use of diesel equipment introduces high concentrations of toxic gases such as CO, NO and NO2 into a confined atmosphere. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has determined that diesel exhaust is a potential human carcinogen, based on a combination of chemical, genotoxicity, and carcinogenicity data. This is due to th ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) proposes to develop a new adaptive optics imaging approach to high- speed 3D-retinal mapping with enhanced Fourier Domain Mode-locked (FDML) swept-source technology. PSI is currently engaged in ongoing development of high performance, high resolution multimodal adaptive optics (AO) retinal imagers. Such systems resolve and quant ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Cancer is America's second leading cause of death. Many approved cancer drugs, such as bortezomib (Velcade), are cytotoxic agents that kill normal cells as well as tumor cells. Therapeutic benefit depends on tumor cellsbeing more sensitive than normal cells, thereby allowing clinical responses to be achieved at relatively safe drug doses; however, damage t ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Asthma is a chronic respiratory disease with a global human and economic burden on patients, and society. Asthma treatment mainly consists of inhaled corticosteroids and bronchodilators, which enable adult populations to function well despite the disease. Small airway inflammation is particularly important in the pathogenesis of asthma in children, and hence th ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The cardiopulmonary bypass circuit (i.e. the Heart Lung Machine) that supports patients undergoing cardiac surgery, is constantly being refined. Both the venous reservoir and the cardiotomy reservoir, prominent in the cardiopulmonary bypass circuit have weakness. Phase II SBIR funding allowed us to develop a Hybrid venous reservoir that (1) is superior in air h ...