Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by the applicant): Autoimmune diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, type I diabetes, and multiple sclerosis, are thought to arise from abnormalities of innate or adaptive immune responses. Autoimmune diseases are often difficult to diagnose, as the symptoms can be typical of other conditions and quite vague, such as musculoskeletal complaints ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Autoimmune diseases are difficult to diagnose, as the symptoms can be typical of other conditions and quite vague. No currently available blood test accurately excludes or includes the possibility of an autoimmune disease in a subject, and a battery of tests and a period of observation are usually required. A single test that could readily distinguish between ...

Low-power Hall thrusters offer potentially important advantages for certain military applications but issues of lifetime and efficiency degradation at lower powers are issues hindering its utilization. A factor impacting efficiency is that thestate-of-the-art techniques for electron generation used for neutralization (such as hollow cathodes operating on the same propellant as the thruster) do no ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Ovarian cancer is the second most common gynecological malignancy and is the fourth leading cause of cancer mortality in women. Ovarian cancer is the second most common gynecological malignancy and is the fourth leading cause of cancer mortality in women. Nationwide 23,400 new cases will be diagnosed in 2002 and 13,900 women will die of ovarian cancer. Only 25% ...

This STTR project develops self-powered PZT sensor/actuators, MEMS temperature sensors and data transmitters, chip-sized mechanical impedance analyzers, and data processing procedures and integrates them into a self-contained structural health-monitoringpackage for wireless inspection of aerospace-weapons systems.The opportunity:Legacy system maintenance, the development of relatively disposable a ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Prostate cancer is the most common malignancy in men in the United States and the second leading cause of cancer mortality. Unfortunately there is no cure by standard medical treatment. Therefore, novel treatments for this devastating, common disease are desperately needed. Recent progress in the development of targeted oncolytic viral vectors offer a new strat ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Despite continued improvements in diagnosis, surgical techniques, and radiation protocols, the available treatments for high-grade malignant glioma are grossly inadequate. The median survival time for most patients with high-grade gliomas is on the order of months. Metastatic tumors with a tropism for the CNS such as lung and breast pose an even greater problem ...

The purpose of this proposal is the research and development of low power (about 100 W) close-drift thruster with improved magnetic field. The patented design of the magnetic field makes possible to dramatically reduce the permissible size of aconventional stationary plasma thruster (SPT) that is limited by magnetic saturation of the inner magnetic path. The thruster with our improved magnetic f ...

Knowledge Analysis Technologies (K-A-T) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) will partner to fulfill this Research and Development effort. We propose an unprecedented suite of Usability Engineering software tools to bebuilt upon the conceptual foundation of Virginia Tech's User Action Framework (UAF). We will use K-A-T's proprietary Latent Semantic Analysis (LS ...

The Air Force maintains a fleet of aircraft that depend on low-observability to successfully carry out their missions. This low-observability depends on a continuity of electrical conductivity at the outer mold line of the aircraft, and thus the panelseams and gaps must be filled with a conducting material. Currently, metal-filled elastomers or resins are used, but these materials suffer from po ...