Award Data

Project Summary Immunoregulation, i.e., balanced expression of regulatory and effector T cells, is thought to be compromised in modern high-income settings due in part to reduced contact with commensal and environmentally derived bacteria, also known as “old friends”. Failed immunoregulation is thought to be one factor contributing to recent increases in stress-related and chronic inflammatory ...

PROJECT SUMMARY An estimated 30 million people in the United States suffer from some form of peripheral neuropathy, a condition that develops as a result of damage to the peripheral nervous system. The top two major causes of peripheral neuropathy in the US are diabetes mellitus (both T1DM and T2DM) and chemotherapeutic agents. Currently, there are no FDA-approved treatments to prevent or reverse ...

Abstract Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA) is the bacterium most frequently isolated from the respiratory tract of ICU pa- tients in the US and is a major cause of pneumonia in intubated patients. Furthermore, infection with PA gener- ally has a poor prognosis, with an estimated 40-69% of PA ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) cases re- sulting in mortality, and more than 30% of survivors suffer recur ...

Neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) is a rare genetic disorder that affects about 1 in 25,000 individuals globally. While usually benign, these tumors result in severe morbidity and mortality in affected individuals. Almost all NF2 patients lose their hearing, and many lose the ability to walk and even to see. NF2 patients’ average age at death is 36 years, many of whom die in adolescence or early ad ...

Lyme disease (LD) is the most prevalent vector-borne disease in the United States, with up to 300,000 cases a year. LD is caused by several species of the spirochete bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato (the Lyme borreliae), which are transmitted by ticks from animal (bird, rodent) reservoirs to human hosts. While a short course of antibiotics is usually effective in eliminating the bacteria a ...

Arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) present a substantial threat to human and animal health worldwide. They are transmitted by hematophagous arthropods, in which mosquitoes are one of the main transmitters. The mosquito specie, Aedes aegypti, is the primary mosquito vector of several widely spread arboviruses as zika, dengue or West Nile viruses. Mosquitoes transmit these pathogens by inoculatin ...

RA is one of the most common chronic autoimmune disorders that can lead to complete joint destruction and severe disability if untreated. There is no cure for RA and up to 50% of RA patients do not respond to anti-TNF therapies as circulating Th-17/IL-17 levels are highly elevated subsequent to TNF blockade. For this subset of RA patients, disruption of a novel pathway that impairs the synergy bet ...

Project Summary Medical imaging technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) have been widely used in studying the underlying mechanisms of mental illnesses and neurological disorders such as brain tumors, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, and depression, etc. However, PET and MRI scans are almost always ordered as separate studies on separate machine ...

PROJECT SUMMARY There is an urgent need for the development of approaches to prevent cardiotoxicity in cancer patients being treated with anthracyclines, an important class of drugs in the treatment of cancer (e.g. doxorubicin). Anthracycline treatment-related cardiotoxicity is a major clinical problem that severely impacts patient care and also limits dose and usage. More than a quarter of patien ...

The advent of checkpoint inhibitor (CPI) therapy in human cancer has dramatically changed the landscape of treatment strategies in recent years. Previously, cancers with largely ineffective therapeutics and a poor prognosis, such as melanoma, have experienced significant advances of patients able to extend survival and/or progression free disease. Within the tumor microenvironment, a number of imm ...