Award Data

Principal Investigators for Small Business: DiscoveryBioMed, Inc. (DBM) and Monell Chemical Senses Center Project Summary Abstract Bitter taste in foods and medicines presents a barrier to overcoming global public health challenges: food insecurity, poor nutritional health, and poor compliance with medication use, particularly among children and the elderly. Sugar and salt, the mainstays to addres ...

Despite important advances in surgical techniques, imagistic modalities and computer-assisted stereotactic delivery of radiation therapy, the prognosis for patients with glioblastoma (GB) remains grim and has not significantly changed in decades. The Stupp protocol—i.e., concurrent temozolomide (TMZ) plus conformal external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) followed by adjuvant TMZ—remains the cornerst ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Thiopurines such as mercaptopurine are S-substituted antimetabolites used as functional analogs to natural nucleobase precursors. They are highly effective against hematologic malignancies (leukemia and lymphoma) and autoimmune diseases (inflammatory bowel diseases [IBD]), with an estimated patient population andgt;350,000 in the US. However, the cytotoxicity of thiopurines depends ...

Project Summary/Abstract Transcriptomic-based approaches, and in recent years, single-cell RNA sequencing, are revolutionizing our understanding of cellular heterogeneity, opening up a new route to identify novel cell markers at unprecedented scale across many different cell types. ​RNA-based live-cell sorting opens up andgt;99% of the marker space to enable higher specificity cell sorting. Howe ...

Project Summary Medical imaging technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) have been widely used in studying the underlying mechanisms of mental illnesses and neurological disorders such as brain tumors, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, and depression, etc. However, PET and MRI scans are almost always ordered as separate studies on separate machine ...

This grant is for translational development of a scalable, nucleic acid-based formulation of cytomegalovirus-vectored vaccines that can be distributed without a cold chain. HIV candidate vaccines that use cytomegalovirus (CMV) as delivery vector and immunomodulatory adjuvant have shown extraordinary promise. In our preliminary work, for example, a rhesus cytomegalovirus-vectored SIV vaccine lackin ...

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 Summary Unprotected receptive anal intercourse (RAI) is the sexual behavior with the highest per-act risk of HIV acquisition, conferring 10 to 20 times more risk than unprotected vaginal intercourse. We are developing an antiviral rectal rinse (enema) using a novel HIV entry inhibitor, the lectin Griffithsin (GRFT), because there is a lack of on-demand antiviral HIV prevention products tha ...

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 ...

Through this STTR contract, we propose to evaluate the efficacy of our vaccine, FlowVax Marburg, in nonhuman primates (NHPs). This will be achieved through four Tasks. In Task 1, we will manufacture the vaccine in a quantity sufficient for the animal studies. In Task 2, we will perform MHC genotyping on a representative population of NHPs and, based on results, select a set of MHC-matched NHPs for ...