Award Data

PROJECT SUMMARY Actively involving informal caregivers in direct patient care at the bedside in the intensive care unit (ICU) has the potential to improve patient, informal caregiver, and health care system outcomes. Practice guidelines call for the liberal inclusion of informal caregivers as active partners in ICU care, but there is a critical, unmet need to develop tools that effectively operati ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Although the ubiquity of metabolic problems in pulmonary hypertension (PH) has been known for more than a decade, a wealth of new details on the nature of this problem presents the opportunity for intervention. A combination of experimental work in cells and animals and early trials in humans, suggests that these metabolic problems are part of the causation for PH, and that inactiv ...

Project Summary Skin is the first line of defense against the outside environment. When the skin barrier is breached by UV irradiation (UVR) or toxic chemicals, living cell layers including epidermal keratinocytes, melanocytes and dermal fibroblasts are subjected to DNA damage. If unrepaired, this damage can lead to photoaging and cutaneous carcinogenesis. In fact, skin cancer is by far the most c ...

Abstract.Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a progressive disorder affecting almost 14% of the general population, and this disease has shown a relentless growth over the past 2 decades. Patients with CKD have higher rates of hospitalization, greater mortality, shorter life expectancy, and their healthcare costs are up to 5 times more expensive than non-CKD patients. Thus, treatments to slow, halt, o ...

Summary Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the third leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. with a 5-year survival rate of andlt;9%. The poor prognosis is partially due to resistance to standard of care treatments including gemcitabine (Gem) and Gem+nab-paclitaxel (n-PTX). The transcription factors HIF-1α and c-MYC are at the center of the mechanisms producing Gem and n-PTX resistance ...

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT: There is currently a technological gap in high-dose-rate brachytherapy (HDR-BT) that has stunted the efficacy of single-fraction HDR-BT monotherapy for prostate cancer patients and is preventing a shift away from invasive interstitial brachytherapy to an intracavitary-only approach for cervical cancer patients. The gap is due to the radiation dose conformity limitations o ...

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a leading cause of dementia, yet no effective therapeutic intervention is available for those in prodromal and early stages of AD. Restoration of functional and cognitive resilience in early disease stages is especially beneficial in many aspects as it could substantially extend the period of quality of life and delay the clinical onset of AD. ...

In 2020 alone, pancreatic cancer is estimated to have resulted in 47,050 deaths in the U.S. making it the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) makes up greater than 90% of all pancreatic cancer diagnoses and has an overall five-year survival rate of just 10%. New therapeutic options are needed to improve the poor prognosis for patients with PDAC. Ex ...

Project Summary/Abstract We propose a new approach to the decontamination of central venous catheters and the prevention of central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI), an important healthcare-associated infection. CLABSIs cost the US healthcare system approximately $2.3 billion annually (Pronovost, NEJM, 2009). Additionally, CLABSIs can be life threatening, especially in the very youn ...

Project Summary Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are a growing health problem in our aging population. Assessment of cognitive functioning for early detection is critical to identify individuals who might benefit from treatment with the available symptomatic medications for mild dementia as well as future disease-modifying therapies that are actively under development and being tested i ...