Award Data

PROJECT SUMMARY The rising number of Americans currently living with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) demands pressing therapeutic and diagnostic solutions. The consensus is that early detection is critical to delay and better manage the disease. The recent discovery of extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their potentially important cellular functions in neuronal-glial communication, synaptic plasticity, o ...

The incidence of type 1 diabetes (T1D) has been increasing in the US for reasons that remain elusive. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that T1D is the third most prevalent chronic disease of childhood in the USA, behind asthma and obesity. Approximately 5% of the 30.3 million adults with diabetes in the USA have T1D. The pathogenesis of T1D encompasses a spectrum that r ...

Project Summary Natural products (NPs) and derivatives thereof provide a rich source of chemical matter for drug discovery and development. Over the past 30 years, NP-derived drugs have accounted for more than 35% of FDA approvals. Despite their demonstrated importance, development of new NPs has slowed over the past 15 years due to the lack of efficient methods for discovery, production, and opti ...

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 Abstract An estimated 5.7 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia (ADRD) and one in ten people age 65 or older show symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. As ADRD progresses so does the level of dependency on others. As the disease progresses, higher levels of dependence in people with Alzheimer’s disease are associated with significantly increased burden and costs ...

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 ...

PROJECT SUMMARY There is an urgent need for the development of new approaches to treat patients suffering from Ulcerative Colitis (UC), which is estimated to impact approximately one million adults in the United States, leading to morbidity, heightened risk of cancer, and mortality. In multiple preclinical studies, we and others have defined the therapeutic potential of low-dose exogenous carbon m ...

The lack of patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) appropriate for youth with neurodevelopmental disabilities (DD) and related cognitive impairments including Down syndrome (DS) poses a significant problem for healthcare research and practice. Parents and other professionals do not identify the same needs as youth, and failure to engage youth with DD in healthcare evaluation compromises healthc ...

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, with more than 300 million people affected. Most adults with depressive symptoms make at least one annual visit to a primary care physician (PCP). As such, primary care offers a ripe opportunity to identify and treat adults with depressive symptomatology. Yet, depression has historically been undertreated in primary ...

Non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA), a lack of sperm in the ejaculate due to defective spermatogenesis, affects as many as 100,000 men in the US, and represents an unmet medical need because many of these men would like to father children, but cannot without surgical intervention. Current therapy for such men is suboptimal, because it relies upon microsurgical testicular sperm extraction (micro-TESE ...