Award Data

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 ...

PROJECT SUMMARY There is an increased interest in peptide medicines in pharmaceutical research and development (Randamp;D) because peptides are recognized as highly selective and efficacious, and at the same time relatively safe and well tolerated. Chemo-enzymatic peptide synthesis (CEPS) using peptide ligases features excellent purity and yield, thus becoming an attractive method to replace tradi ...

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 ...

SUMMARYIn 2014 the United States experienced an outbreak of a previously unknown neurological disease with polio-like symptoms later known as acute flaccid myelitis (AFM). A biennial surge in cases of AFM in 2016 and 2018 has alarmed public health officials. Since then, rapidly accumulating clinical, immunological, and epidemiological evidence has pointed to EV-D68 as the major causative agent of ...

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 ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Thiopurines such as mercaptopurine are S-substituted antimetabolites used as functional analogs to natural nucleobase precursors. They are highly effective against hematologic malignancies (leukemia and lymphoma) and autoimmune diseases (inflammatory bowel diseases [IBD]), with an estimated patient population andgt;350,000 in the US. However, the cytotoxicity of thiopurines depends ...

PROJECT SUMMARY The rising number of Americans currently living with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) demands pressing therapeutic and diagnostic solutions. The consensus is that early detection is critical to delay and better manage the disease. The recent discovery of extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their potentially important cellular functions in neuronal-glial communication, synaptic plasticity, o ...

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 ...

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant Therapeutics is focused on the development of adjuvant systems with desired immune activities for targeted indications The Companyandapos s immune stimulatory adjuvant platform builds on combinatorial use of immune agonists with distinct immune targets and mechanisms of action for the generation of therapeutic immune responses Critical to this platform techno ...

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant Infectious bone disease is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide Successful treatment often requires surgical intervention with longer term antibiotic therapy Bacterial biofilm pathogens are associated with most osseous infections and represent a major target of therapy The biofilm pathogens associated with chronic bone infections bind to and co ...