Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): It is uniformly recognized that sedentariness - the sitting disease - is bad for the health of the nation. The solution to reversing sedentariness involves devising and disseminating real-world solutions to promote day-long physical activity and help people who want to, to lose weight and improve their blood glucose, lipids and blood pressure. The Gruve is ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project aims to develop a commercial software product, VirtualDoseTM, for calculating and analyzing patient radiation doses from x-ray computed tomography (CT) examinations. Despite its essential role in radiology, CT is responsible for raising the collective medical radiation dose to the American population to a level that is associated with measurable a ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Alzheimer's disease (AD) occurs in one out of eight Americans of age 65 and affects 43% of the elderly over 85. Current FDA-approved drugs only provide symptomatic relief of AD. There is a pressing need to discover newdisease-modifying medications. AD is multifactorial in origin and progression. A drug attenuating several underlying factors is a preferred ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Even though the association of -amyloid peptide (A ) deposition and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) underpins the major hypothesis for disease progression and possibly causation and several drugs addressing the formation or removal of -amyloid plaques have entered clinical trials, no effective therapy exists to date for AD. This reality calls for new targets th ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Standard microfracture is a first-line, widely used and cost-effective surgical technique for repairing damaged articular cartilage, but, it is limited by decreased long-term efficacy and limited applicability in largerlesions. This leads to a burgeoning economic burden associated with primary and follow-up treatment costs, estimated at more than 40 billion dol ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Controlling mechanical signal transduction to treat osteoarthritis Abstract The TRPV4 calcium (Ca++) permeable ion channel has been shown to be expressed and functional in chondrocytes, the cells responsible for the maintenance of cartilage in weight-bearing joints. Trauma of joints with subsequent damage of cartilage, as well as chronically increased joint loa ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long term goal of this project is to develop and commercialize noninvasive equipment, called the sleep and respiratory track (SARTrak) system, for high throughput detection of sleep apnea in animals. The specific goal for the Phase I application is to design and evaluate a basic model of the SARTrak system with eight chambers (one chamber per animal), i.e. ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Patients with infective endocarditis (IE) have a poor prognosis with one third of the patients succumbing to the infection within the first year. Treatments for endocarditis involve antibiotic therapy and/or surgery that cost upwards of 100,000 per patient; however, many cases do not respond to the antibiotic treatment and surgery poses high risks. Cases of en ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to synthesize, based on genomic sequence information, a human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) strain with demonstrated ability to establish persistent infection in sero-positive individuals. The resulting synthetic product will form the basis for the development of attenuated HCMV vaccines. Innovative synthetic biology methods will overcome ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): It is well established that aging and many chronic diseases, such as cancer and heart failure, are associated with significant losses in skeletal muscle mass and strength in humans. There is agreement across the musclebiology community that important morphological characteristics of muscle fibers, such as fiber area, the number and position of myonuclei, cellul ...