Award Data

Summary: According to the most recent CDC report, the incidence of sepsis in the United States is over 1.7 million each year, resulting in about 270,000 deaths and over $20 billion in healthcare costs. Sepsis results from infection of any microorganisms with bacteria being the most common. Pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), such as lipopolysaccharides (LPS) activate innate immune cell ...

PROJECT SUMMARY - PEDIATRIC HEART VALVE WITH EXPANSION CAPABILITYCongenital heart valve defects are detected in nearly 40,000 infants born in the United States each year (Alsoufi 2014). The heart valve defect can range in severity, with about 25% of cases (about 13,000) requiring immediate open- heart surgery to replace the valve or other heart defects. Currently, there is no surgical heart valve ...

PROJECT SUMMARYAminoglycosides are one of the cheapest and well-known antibiotics in clinical use for over 70 years, but one of the major limitations in their use is their ototoxicity. We are developing fast and low-cost methods to develop aminoglycosides with anti-ribosomal activities and reduced toxicity. In this project, we will identify novel aminoglycoside antibacterials, that show reduced ot ...

Project Summary A novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has become one of the greatest challenges of the modern world and has caused a pandemic with millions of infected people and hundreds of thousands of deaths around the globe. Transmissions occur through respiratory droplets, as well as through contaminated hands and environmental surfaces. Therefore, cleaning and disinfection of potentially contamin ...

Project Summary The long-term goal of this project proposal is to develop and commercialize a therapy to assist pre-term, and term infants with hypoxic ischemic brain injury (HIE), with feeding difficulty. Independent feeding is critical for infants to be discharged home with their families and avoid a gastrostomy tube (G-tube) placement. The current standard of care for infants with feeding diffi ...

PROJECT SUMMARY Kennedy’s disease also known as spinobulbar muscular atrophy (SBMA) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease caused by genetic polyglutamine expansion of the androgen receptor (AR). Recent research has shown that the mutant AR protein misfolds, aggregates, and abnormally interacts with other proteins, leading to hormone-dependent lower motor neuron degeneration and skeletal mus ...

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 ...

PROJECT SUMMARY—When neck and back pain becomes intractable, spinal fusion is the gold-standard treatment. However, up to 12% of these fusions fail due to infection, resulting in substantial personal and financial costs. In most cases, these infections are associated with the hardware used to stabilize the fusion. Traditionally molded or machined polyether ether ketone (PEEK) cages are widely us ...

Liver fibrosis/cirrhosis affects more than 100 million people worldwide and represents one of the most common causes of death in adults. Currently no effective pharmacotherapy is available for liver fibrosis. The only proven therapy is liver transplantation. Recent studies implicate that some isoforms of histone deacetylase (HDAC) play a role in development of liver fibrosis but all current HDAC i ...

---Project Summary/Abstract ---- Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the deadliest forms of cancer. Poor survival rates are largely due to the late stage at which PDAC is diagnosed and a lack of effective therapies. The long-term goal of this research program is to discover new immunotherapeutic approaches for the treatment of PDAC. Preliminary studies by our group and others have sh ...