Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Osteoporosis affects 10 million Americans and another 34 million are osteopenic and at risk for developing osteoporosis. Bone fractures, the most important complication of osteoporosis, cause substantial morbidity andmortality in the aging population as well as significant socio-economic cost. Since the 1960's, bisphosphonate drug therapy has produced mod ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Tumor-induced osteomalacia (TIO, or oncogenic osteomalacia) is an insidious, progressive, paraneoplastic disorder of abnormal phosphate and vitamin D metabolism caused by excessive fibroblast growth factor 23 (FGF23).Due to a lack of appreciation of the existence of this disease, as well as a typically slow onset of symptoms, the prevalence of TIO is most like ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We discovered that the inducible keratins 6a and 6b, mutations in which can result in the skin and nail disorder pachyonychia congenita (PC), contain regulatory motifs in their 5'-untranslated regions that make them susceptible to mTOR inhibitors, including rapamycin. Using RNA profiling and immunohistochemistry of foot sole biopsies taken from PC lesions ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There is a need for multiplexed assay technologies that enable diagnostics and detailed characterization of rheumatoid arthritis. In this project we plan to discover new rheumatoid arthritis biomarkers and implement them in a panel of multiplexed assays. We propose a novel approach that offers significant advances over existing methods, including the ability to ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): From cosmetics, to supplements and pharmaceuticals- natural products using a wide-array of botanicals play an important role in our health and wellbeing. However, deceitful adulteration poses a great risk to the naturalproducts industry and the safety of its consumers; there are a number of well-known cases involving substitution by toxic species that have led ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Natural products are rich sources for potential drugs. To accelerate drug discovery from natural products, it is imperative to identify their molecular targets, and mechanistically elucidate their bioavailability, toxicity, and therapeutic effects. However, there remain several challenges in the field. Among them, there is currently no technical platform that c ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), a rapidly growing class of targeted therapeutics, represent a promising new approach toward improving both the selectivity and the cytotoxic activity of cancer drugs. Although several ADCs have demonstrated recent clinical success, the utility of most ADCs currently in development is limited by cumbersome synthetic processes, in ...

Our goal in this proposal is to develop a novel method for the direct detection of miRNAs in serum and plasma without requiring isolation of total RNA. Distinct expression profiles of microRNAs (miRNAs) have recently been associated with cancer and other diseases, implying that miRNAs could serve as diagnostic biomarkers for these diseases. Effective biomarkers could facilitate early detection of ...

Engineering'of'Human'H.NOX'as'an'Oxygen'Delivery'Therapeutic'for'Prolonged'Administration' ' ' Project Summary/Abstract Omniox has developed a class of tunable oxygen-delivery agents that significantly alleviate tumor hypoxia to enhance the efficacy of radiotherapy (RT). This family of therapeutic proteins, called H-NOX, can oxy ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The incidence of skin cancer is increasing rapidly in the US. In 1994, there were around 1 million cases of non-melanoma skin cancer per year; this number had grown to more than 4 million by 2011. Many of these tumorsappear in areas of the body that are exposed to sunlight (face, hands, etc.), where cosmetic considerations require minimizing resection of norma ...