Award Data

Special Operations Forces (SOF) are an integral aspect of the US military. SOF operators are among the most elite and highly qualified individuals in the U.S. military. As such, extraordinary physical and mental demands are placed upon them to excel in extreme environments for extended periods of time. This unrelenting cycle of combat deployments and intense pre-deployment training shortens the fu ...

Flow Pharma, Inc. is a biotechnology company in the San Francisco Bay Area developing fully synthetic cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL)stimulating peptide vaccines for Marburg virus. The FlowVax vaccine platform allows us to create dry powder formulations of biodegradablemicrospheres and TLR adjuvants incorporating class I and class II T cell epitopes. FlowVax vaccines can be designed for delivery by i ...

Additive manufacturing (AM) has rapidly evolved into a valuable technique for making parts which, at times, cannot be fabricated through conventional machining methods.One challenge in the area of AM is the lack of real-time feedback on the fabrication process and the quality of the part being made.This is especially critical given the relatively long periods of time that complex parts can require ...

On this effort Toyon Research Corp. and The Pennsylvania State University are developing deep learning-based algorithms for object recognition and new class discovery in look-down infrared (IR) imagery. Our approach involves the development of a hybrid classifier that exploits both transfer learning and semi-supervised paradigms in order to maintain good generalization accuracy, especially when li ...

Acclimatization is the long-term adjustment that humans experience when exposed for weeks or months to high altitude. Acclimatization is important in this context because a warfighter who is acclimatized to high altitude is immune to high altitude illness, has superior work capacity, and has cognitive function approaching that found at sea level. In other words, the acclimatized warfighter is opti ...

Face recognition performance using deep learning has seen dramatic improvements in recent years. This improvement has been fueled in part by the curation of large labeled training datasets with millions of images of hundreds of thousands of subjects.This results in effective generalization for matching over pose, illumination, expression and age variation, however these datasets have traditionally ...

The focus of this STTR phase I component is on proof-of-concept studies demonstrating applicability of technical approaches for identificationof circulatory diagnostic markers for infectious disease. Therefore, the primary objective of this project is to determine feasibility of one suchtechnical approach called Proteomics-based Expression Library Screening (PELS), for identification of pathogen-d ...

There are currently no vaccines or therapeutics available for Marburg Virus Disease (MVD). Given the specter of weaponization and the terriblemorbidity and high mortality rate of MVD, this represents a critical threat to the operational readiness of the Warfighter. While traditionalvaccines have proven to be a huge contribution to public health, they do have some limitations especially in the cont ...

Marburg virus (MARV) is a filamentous enveloped non-segmented negative sense RNA virus. This viruse is considered to be extremelydangerous with case fatality rates as high as 88-90%. Extensive efforts have gone towards effective vaccines for MARV prevention, however,none have been successfully established as licensed vaccines. Glycoprotein (GP) is the only surface protein of MARV. There are substa ...

The introduction of substandard or counterfeit materials into the DoD supply chain can have extremely expensive, and potentially life threatening, consequences. Current techniques used to detect nonconforming materiel can be destructive (e.g., manual sectioning and inspection of a part), time consuming and expensive (e.g., micro-computed tomography, ultrasound), or provide only limited informatio ...