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Allosteric Drug Discovery using Quantum Cascade Laserbased Anisotropic THz Microscope (QCL-ATM) Proposal in Response to NIH/NIGMS STTR PA-20-265 This STTR will result in a commercially viable instrument that will enable critical research in allosteric drugs and protein dynamics. To date allosteric inhibitors are largely found serendipitously. Anisotropic THz microspectroscopy (ATM) uniquely measur ...

Project Summary: Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. Low dose chest computed tomography (CT) screening programs that target high-risk individuals can reduce lung cancer-specific mortality by 20% and overall mortality by 6.9%. There is a growing movement to implement this life saving screening into routine practice, with endorsements from the U.S. Prevent ...

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a devastating neuropsychiatric disease with a high prevalence (up to 2.2% of women) and significant morbidity and mortality. There are currently no effective therapeutic agents for the disorder. The goal of Courage Therapeutics is the development of melanocortin-3 receptor (MC3R) -specific agonist peptides for the treatment of anorexia nervosa. The product of this Phase I ...

Project Summary Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is a debilitating condition causing a wide range of disabilities including behavioral and intellectual deficits, facial dysmorphology, and organ malformations. This disorder has a profound impact on health care burden and cost; as many as 5% of children within the United States are affected by this condition, with lifetime treatment costs reac ...

N- and O-linked glycosylation are some of the most common, abundant, and biologically important posttranslational modifications of proteins, yet they are also some of the most difficult to study. The dominant analytical platform for the study of glycosylation is mass spectrometry, yet this platform on its own is incomplete, because it cannot elucidate glycan topology and linkage stereochemistry. T ...

Project Summary The goal of this project is to demonstrate feasibility of a system for the point-of-care (POC) detection of Chlamydia trachomatis (CT) in human urine samples that integrates a patented detector of pathogens based on identification of species-specific, nucleic acid (NA) sequences. The detector relies on a novel electromechanical signal transduction mechanism that enables the low-cos ...

Perfusion Medical is commercializing a novel pipeline product called PEG-20k IV Solution. The company believes this may be the first therapeutic to directly treat lethal complications of sepsis, and as such, support new thinking on the basic mechanisms of the disease. Sepsis or septic syndrome leads to a spectrum of illnesses and occurs at a frequency of 1.7 million people in the US each year and ...

PROJECT SUMMARYAcne vulgaris is a skin inflammatory condition affecting 80% of young adults and can frequently induce permanent disfigurement even with appropriate treatment. Acne is caused by C. acnes in the setting of hormonal changes and sebum induction that accompany adolescence. The mainstay of therapeutics consist of eradicating C. acnes and reducing inflammation. However, treatment is prolo ...

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Stroke injury occurs over a long duration through pathologic changes leading to long-term neurologic dysfunction. There is an urgent need of therapeutic strategies that can provide safe and efficacious therapeutic effects to the hypoperfused brain with long-lasting endogenous neuroprotection for prevention of long-term neurologic dysfunction. Sufficient evidence has pointe ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Approximately 4% of people in the US are either deaf or hard of hearing, equating to more than 13 million people. Of these, approximately 12 million people over the age of 5 years have difficulty hearing normal conversation even when using a hearing aid. Hearing difficulties affect all age groups and present significant challenges in daily life. These challenges are particularly ac ...