Award Data

PROJECT SUMMARY Although the ubiquity of metabolic problems in pulmonary hypertension (PH) has been known for more than a decade, a wealth of new details on the nature of this problem presents the opportunity for intervention. A combination of experimental work in cells and animals and early trials in humans, suggests that these metabolic problems are part of the causation for PH, and that inactiv ...

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 ...

SUMMARY: Many cancers are recognized to have an inflammatory etiology. Gastric cancer, the third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, is the prototype- it is caused by infection with the bacterial pathogen Helicobacter pylori in 90% of cases. For colorectal cancer (CRC), the second leading cause of cancer deaths, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a frequent precursor lesion. This STTR Phase ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Current therapy for ischemic stroke is limited and new treatment is needed since the mortality and morbidity of subjects with this condition remain high. Effort aimed at blocking immune cell- mediated inflammation represents a novel approach. The specific background for the proposed project is that we have identified the myeloid P2X4 receptor (P2X4R), which induces inflammation, as ...

Project Summary/AbstractMood disorders, like many psychiatric conditions, have their onset in emerging adulthood and often last a lifetime. Mental illnesses have an excessively large loading of Disability Adjusted Life Years, making early intervention crucial for both individuals and society. Differentiating bipolar disorder (BD) from major depressive disorder (MDD) based on the Diagnostic and Sta ...

ABSTRACT: Cutaneous vascular malformations (CVM), such as port wine stain (PWS) which occurs in 0.3–0.5% of newborns, are often a cause of great concern to patients for both medical and cosmetic reasons. Laser irradiation with flashlamp-pumped pulsed dye lasers, i.e. photothermolysis therapy (PTT), is currently the gold standard treatment for PWS. Most patients with PWS, however, fail to clear c ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Understanding of tumor molecular characteristics during a course of radiotherapy (RT) treatment is crucial to assess the efficacy of the treatment and adapt radiation dosage to optimize outcomes. Unfortunately, this cannot be routinely achieved by current diagnostic nuclear imaging modalities due to complex logistics and prohibitive costs. Alternatively, Cerenkov Emission (CE) is a ...

Arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) present a substantial threat to human and animal health worldwide. They are transmitted by hematophagous arthropods, in which mosquitoes are one of the main transmitters. The mosquito specie, Aedes aegypti, is the primary mosquito vector of several widely spread arboviruses as zika, dengue or West Nile viruses. Mosquitoes transmit these pathogens by inoculatin ...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - huESC HTS2 - human Toxic stress effects in 1st trimester pregnancy leads to $10s of billions of US health care costs/year and is a significant part of the $2.5-4B/year US Developmental and Reproductive Technology (DART industry. Current DART techniques use slow, expensive pregnant rodent tests, or tests of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) that are cultured to lose “stemness” and ...

Abstract For the extent of our careers as Alzheimer’s researchers, we have struggled with the limitations imposed by the standard techniques for protein analysis. Western blot, the go-to protein technology of the bench researcher, is no match for the complex brain protein distortions of AD. To remedy this debility, we devised a technology that we are making available to all researchers through t ...