Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Newborn screening is currently performed by collecting dried bloodspots from infants and then sending them to a lab for analysis. There is an increasing necessity to screen for a number of disease conditions for which therapies are becoming available. Lysosomal storage diseases alone number greater than 40. There is a need to minimize the blood collecte ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Many human diseases can theoretically be treated by injection of healthy or engineered cells into damaged tissue, where ideally they will engraft and remodel the damaged tissue into healthy tissue. However, numerous obstacles stand in the way of this regenerative technology becoming reality. Perhaps the greatest obstacle is that cells injected into many tissues ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Infection surrounding metal implants is a common and sometimes devastating cause of implant failure in a number of fields including oral, craniomaxillofacial (CMF), orthopedic, and cardiovascular surgery. These infections, which arise from the establishment of biofilms on device surfaces, not only necessitate new surgeries but in themselves present a significan ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): According to the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, 86% of adults over 70 years have at least moderate periodontitis and over a quarter have lost their teeth, which has serious repercussion on health and quality of life. Because of bone loss caused by this disease, bone grafting is routinely necessary prior to the placement of dental implan ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Approximately 500,000 bone-grafting procedures are performed each year in the United States (Boden, 2002). Autologous iliac crest bone graft continues to be the gold standard because it provides the three essential elements for bone formation: osteoprogenitor cells, an osteoconductive matrix, and osteoinductive molecules. Iliac crest harvest is however associat ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In this Phase I Small Business Innovative Research application, Bioptigen Inc. proposes to prototype a portable, handheld cornea and anterior segment optical coherence tomography (CAS-OCT) scanner for use in clinical and applied research applications. OCT is a relatively new technology for ophthalmic imaging, which uses low-coherence interferometry to obtain cr ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Alcohol use disorders continue to be a growing problem in the United States. Fifty-three percent of Americans consume alcohol on a regular basis (SAMHSA, 2006). Approximately 6 percent of those users meet the criteria f or alcohol abuse or dependence (SAMHSA, 2005); 3 percent of the U.S. population. Currently, alcohol use disorders are only covered superficiall ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Novel Intervention for Amyloid-Induced Neuroinflammation Extracellular deposition of the amyloid a-protein (Aa) in brain is a prominent pathological feature of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related disorders. Fibrillar Aa deposition in the cerebral vasculature, a condition known as cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), is also commonly found in AD. Additionally, se ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Novel Intervention for Colitis The scope of the current proposal is to determine whether administration of an apoE mimetic peptide, COG112, improves clinical, histological and inflammatory outcomes in clinically relevant paradigms of colitis. Specifically, we will employ the acute Citrobacter rodentium (C. rodentium) model, an acute Dextran Sulfate Sodium (DSS) ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder that affects approximately 500,000 people in the US and an additional 50,000 are diagnosed each year. This disease is characterized by tremors in the limbs, bradykinesia, akinesia, rigid limbs, and a shuffling gait. The symptoms of PD are caused by the destruction of dopaminergic neurons in th ...