Award Data

ABSTRACTUp to 30% of low birth weight preterm infants manifest some form of periventricular white matter injury (PWMI) making it the most common form of brain injury affecting premature infants. PWMI is associated with significant morbidity, as affected individuals may have profound intellectual impairment and cerebral palsy. Highlighting the magnitude of PWMI, each year more than 400,000 infants ...

AbstractImpaired mitochondrial respiration plays a key role in metabolic, cardiovascular, and aging-related diseases. However, mitochondrial respirometry analysis currently requires processing of the living tissue sample within an hour after being taken from the patient. This requirement makes respirometry analysis largely unfeasible to standard clinical practice and clinical studies. We invented ...

PROJECT SUMMARY There is an urgent need for the development of new approaches to treat patients suffering from Ulcerative Colitis (UC), which is estimated to impact approximately one million adults in the United States, leading to morbidity, heightened risk of cancer, and mortality. In multiple preclinical studies, we and others have defined the therapeutic potential of low-dose exogenous carbon m ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...