Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Osteoarthritis (OA) is the leading cause of chronic disability in the United States. A clinical goal in the treatment and prevention of OA is to develop replacement cartilage using tissue engineering (TE) technologies. Although TE cartilage presently lacks the mechanical stability of native cartilage, studies have demonstrated that mechanical stability can be e ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Genomic instabilityinduced by DNA damageand partly mitigated by DNA repair and antioxidantsplays a critical role in the pathogenesis of many major human diseasessuch as neurodegenerationcancer and cardiovascular diseasetogether with agingThere is a critical need for automated assays that can perform these assessmentsand bring them into greater routine usewhich will help advance our ...

PROJECT SUMMARYThree of top five causes of death in humans globally are lung relatedchronic obstructive pulmonary diseaseCOPDlower respiratory infections and lung cancers collectively account for over eight million deaths annuallyCurrentlyin preclinical settingstatic cell cultures and animal models are the most widely used systems for mechanistic and translational studiesHowevercritical limitation ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Even though the association of -amyloid peptide (A ) deposition and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) underpins the major hypothesis for disease progression and possibly causation and several drugs addressing the formation or removal of -amyloid plaques have entered clinical trials, no effective therapy exists to date for AD. This reality calls for new targets th ...

PROJECT SUMMARYABSTRACT To datethe standard method to access a mouse tail vein is manual injectionbut its yield rate is poor in generalThis leads to multiple needle insertions associated with tissue damage and painBesidesfailure in tail vein injection leads to data lossand thereby more animals will be required to compensate itFinallythe dose variation induced by unreliable injection increases erro ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In the United States, around 76,250 new cases of melanoma and 9,180 melanoma-related deaths are predicted for 2012. With the therapeutic options currently available, metastatic melanoma patients face the bleak prospectof at best, 10 month's survival and a one-in-ten chance of surviving for 10 years. Surgery and radiation therapy are the mainstay of treatme ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to synthesize, based on genomic sequence information, a human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) strain with demonstrated ability to establish persistent infection in sero-positive individuals. The resulting synthetic product will form the basis for the development of attenuated HCMV vaccines. Innovative synthetic biology methods will overcome ...

Abstract Despite significant effortsno cure exists for the major respiratory diseases such as asthmaemphysema and pulmonary fibrosis due to a lack of proper preclinical methodsDrug development is often carried out in cultured cellsWhile amenable to imaging and manipulationthis approach lacks the native tissue environment and neglects the effects of mechanical forces due to breathing which influenc ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of this study is to develop a head tracking procedure for the automated assessment of hearing in infants using Visual Reinforcement Audiometry (VRA). The head tracking procedure will be incorporated into the Intelligent Visual Reinforcement Audiometry (IVRA) system from Intelligent Hearing Systems Corp. The IVRA system currently provides automa ...

PROJECT SUMMARY The for profit small business concernTricorder Array Technologies LLCwill developin partnership with the University of Alabama at BirminghamSIDECAReSensing and Integrating Data for Environmental Conditions in Animal ResearchThis device will automate collection of relevant data that will enhance consistency in animal models used to study human health treatment researchOur innovative ...