Award Data

Coccidioidomycosis, also known as Valley Fever, is a disease caused by inhalation of Coccidioides arthroconidia. This disease is endemic to the southwestern United States, parts of Mexico, and Central and South America. Every year approximately 150,000 people in the United States become infected with Coccidioides spp. Importantly, the rate of Valley Fever cases is increasing dramatically, earni ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Currently, FDA-licensed pharmaceuticals used to treat rheumatoid arthritis (RA) focus largely on alleviation of symptoms, either through pain management, general immunosuppression, or by antagonizing cytokines such as TNF-?. Despite recent advances in biologic therapies, these treatments do not address the underlying autoimmune condition. Ligand epitope antigen ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Problem: Venous thromboembolism (VTE), which encompasses the diseases of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE), is a common and life-threatening problem amongst cancer patients. In population-basedstudies, cancer has been associated with a 4-fold increase risk for VTE; in cancer patients undergoing systemic chemotherapy treatment the risk i ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Type II diabetes (T2DM) affects more than 5% of the population in Western countries. In the US alone, about 23.6M children and adults have diabetes, and the associated cost was estimated to 174 billion in 2007. The rise in T2DM prevalence is linked to the dramatically increased incidence of obesity, which now affects about a third of the adult US population. H ...

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Despite major advances in pharmaceuticals and medical device technology, the ability to safely and effectively control blood glucose in patients with Type 1 diabetes has remained a recalcitrant challenge and a significant source of human suffering and economic cost. With the advent of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), increasing effort has been focuse ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging is widely used for non-invasive diagnosis of a variety of diseases. However due to the intrinsic properties of existing gadolinium-chelate contrast agents, there exist clinical needs of improved MRI contrast agents that render extended circulatory half-life enabling blood pool imaging with favorable biodistribution a ...

DESCRIPTION: Carbon nanomaterial such as fullerenes, carbon nanotubes (single wall; SWNT and multi-wall; MWNT), and graphene are used in many different applications such as cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, energy applications, structural materials, and relatedareas so they inevitably end up in the environment. Little is known about how these nanomaterials behave in air, water or soil and the risk to hu ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): EPA's Cleaning-Up the Nations Waste Sites: Market and Technology Trends (2004) estimates that there are 294,000 contaminated waste sites in the United States. Characterizing suspected contaminated sites remains difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Samples are typically sent to laboratories for costly testing that can take weeks. While some field det ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This Phase I project is motivated by current issues associated with screening for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP). ROP is the leading cause of blindness in infants. In recent years the number of infants at risk for ROPhas been increasing. In the United States, the rate of prematurity has risen from 9.4% of all births in 1981 to 12% in 2010, for a total of over ...

Summary Teleretinal programs have expanded in recent years, primarily to screen for diabetic retinopathy. Accurate and consistent assessment of the retinal vasculature, which often sustains damage as a result of cardiovascular disease, would advance teleretinal screening in terms of robustness and cost. Unfortunately, assessing changes to the retinal vasculature and quantifying abnormalities in re ...