Award Data

PROJECT SUMMARY Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a rising problem in the United States and around the world, with pain and stress being major factors for initial drug seeking and relapse. The mesolimbic dopamine (DA) system originating in the midbrain ventral tegmental area (VTA) and projecting to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in the striatum is an important nexus for the rewarding properties of opioids ...

Project Summary Heart disease remains the leading cause of mortality in the world and, drug-induced cardiotoxicity is a major cause of drug failure and withdrawal from the clinic or the market, contributing to the poor overall success rate of drug development programs. In vitro models of cardiac contractility have the potential to generate predictive data earlier in the pipeline to reduce later-st ...

SUMMARYThe Covid-19 pandemic caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is currently the most important public health crisis in the world. Given the unprecedented scope of this disease, it is critical to explore novel strategies to mitigate this crisis. Aleph Therapeutics and UCSF have jointly developed eTIP1, a Therapeutic Interfering Particle. eTIP1 was developed under a DARPA ...

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Every year in the United States about 30% of the 60,000 infants born extremely premature (andlt;30 weeks gestational age and andlt;1000 g birth-weight [ELGA]) develop intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH). IVH is associated with high risk for cerebral palsy and significant intellectual disability, causing lifelong implications for affected children and their families and consi ...

Abstract. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects more than 5M Americans today, and is the most common cause of dementia in adults. While current medications slightly delay symptoms, no medications exist to cure or stop disease progression. A current focus at NIA is to identify novel drug targets, that address resilience to AD; also, there is an increasing perspective at NIA that Multi-target therapy m ...

7. Project Summary Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia and is a growing problem as populations age. More than 25 million people are affected by dementia worldwide with most suffering from AD. AD is characterized by the presence of plaques of insoluble amyloid-beta (Aβ) and tangles of hyperphosphorylated aggregates of the cytoskeletal protein, tau. Thus far, most AD tre ...

ABSTRACT The overall goal of this STTR project is to commercialize a novel optical eye scanner device capable of measuring the biomechanical properties of tissues via Brillouin light scattering. The Brillouin technology invented in the co-PI’s lab has shown broad potential for improving the diagnosis and treatment of vision disorders. Clinical data obtained with current laboratory systems reveal ...

Project Summary/Abstract Low oxygen (hypoxic) environments are known to be important for maintaining the small number of adult stem cells in the human body, such as in bone marrow. These conditions are also believed to enable dormant cancer cells to survive and metastasize years or decades after the original tumor has been destroyed and the reason why bone marrow is one of the most common sites of ...

PROJECT SUMMARY In the United States, nearly 100,000 patients receive general anesthesia and sedation daily to safely undergo surgical and non-surgical procedures. A high proportion of these patients are older than 65 years of age. These older patients are at higher risk of post-operative delirium and cognitive dysfunction. Many of these older patients have dementia, including mild cognitive impai ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Asthma is the most common chronic pediatric disease in the United States, affecting 6.2 million or 1 in 12 children. Despite advances in the management of childhood asthma, asthma exacerbation results in approximately 550,000 emergency department (ED) visits, 80,000 hospitalizations, and hundreds of premature deaths each year. Early symptoms of asthma exacerbation, especially in ch ...