Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is characterized by fatty changes in the liver with inflammation and hepatocellular injury that in advanced stages leads to fibrosis and cirrhosis and high mortality rates. NASH is frequently associated with other common metabolic abnormalities, such as insulin resistance and visceral obesity. Liver transplantation is curren ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Type II restriction enzymes (REases) are indispensible tools of modern medical research. It has long been a goal of REase manufacturers to be able to offer programmable specificity enzymes, where the sequence recognizedand resulting cutting activity can be precisely directed to any desired point in a DNA, as this will offer opportunity for improvement in many a ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Heart attacks (i.e. myocardial infarction or MI) occur in more than 1.2 million patients annually. Advances in pharmacological therapy have dramatically improved survival following the initial MI. Consequently, the number of patients with previous MI continues to increase, and as a result, put in jeopardy millions of patients for development of heart failure. I ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The broad and long-term objective of this project is to amplify the effectiveness of vaccines without the use of chemical or biological adjuvants. We will address this objective by demonstrating the feasibility for small laser- based devices to enhance responses to intradermal vaccination. A number of investigators have shown that a promising new way to make va ...

Problem to be Solved: Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a deadly disease that accounts for 15-20% of all diagnosed breast cancers worldwide. Metastatic relapse of TNBC carries a poorer prognosis and lower survival rate compared to other breast cancersubtypes. Therefore, identifying novel targets and new therapeutics to treat patients diagnosed with TNBC remains a significant priority of the ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Due to the absence of effective therapies, pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths in both men and women. This study focuses on the development of new small molecule inhibitors targeting Focal Adhesion Kinase against pancreatic cancer. Focal Adhesion Kinase (FAK) has been shown to play an important role in tumor cell survival, including p ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Cisplatin is a cornerstone therapy for a number of cancers including testicular, bladder, ovarian and lung. It is also used to treat cancers in children. In all cases there is a high incidence of acute kidney injury (AKI) that can also lead to later stage kidney damage. This risk limits its use. We have found in pilot studies that renalase, or peptide fragment ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the United States with some sub-types remaining essentially untreatable, expansion of available drug targets will provide significant new options for the development ofmore effective antineoplastic agents. The major goal of this project is to apply a unique drug discovery strategy to cancer drug development. Th ...

Project Summary / Abstract Although standard MRI techniques provide valuable structural insight, a related technique known as magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) adds powerful real-time metabolic information about the tissues under study. MRS provides early detection of disease, monitoring treatment efficacy, and, in the case of cancer, a dramatic reduction in unnecessary biopsies. However, bro ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Project Summary/Abstract RNA modifications are numerous, and range from simple methylation to complex changes such as addition of aminoacylcarbamoyl moieties. These modifications and, the levels at which are present, are emerging as important regulators of biological processes, and perturbations such as chemical or drug exposure can alter the patterns of specif ...