Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Understanding the precise molecular interactions between drugs and their targets, their structure-activity relationship (SAR), is a highly desirable goal during drug development. Elucidation of SAR for G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) is a complicated task because direct structural visualization of these proteins is difficult or impossible. We have created a ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The objective of this project is to demonstrate a methodology for improving the quality of retinal images taken with standard fundus camera. Kestrel has developed a family of algorithms that perform image retinal enhancement through the implementation of a methods that are inspired from human visual system mechanisms. Standard retinal images often suffer from i ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As more proteins are identified from the genome-sequencing projects, there is an increasing need for reliable and cost efficient means for expression and purification of proteins of academic and clinical importance. LifeSensors has developed a novel SUMO-fusion system to enhance expression, and solubility of a wide variety of proteins in E. coli, and to facilit ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The "bottleneck" for structural and functional Genomics and Proteomics is efficient expression and purification of the proteins of interest. Advances in fusion systems have played a major role in enhancing expression of proteins. However, in many cases, using a fusion tag does not increase yield of expressed proteins because the fusion is cleaved by the host en ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Humans have become increasingly dependent on technology, particularly electronic devices. In the past decade, electronic devices have become more mobile, enabling people to use medical devices, cellular/satellite phones, laptop computers, and GPS as they move around cities or in the wilderness. At present, all of these devices run off of batteries which have l ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Interstitial cystitis (IC) is a chronic, severely debilitating disease of the urinary bladder. It can be described as a chronic inflammatory condition of the bladder wall, characterized by urinary frequency and urgency, and severe suprapubic and/or pelvic pain. Presently, there is limited medical therapy for IC and new and effective treatment is a major unmet m ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Bioterrorism using anthrax is a major risk in the US and abroad, and, therefore, has been classified as an NIAID Category A Priority Pathogen. The best strategy against anthrax is a safe and effective vaccine. The existing human vaccine against Anthrax has a history of a high incidence of toxicity and modest, transient humoral immune responses. This project ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Reaction Biology Corporation (RBC) has developed an extremely low cost nanoliter reaction microarray to serve various drug discovery needs for high throughput screening (HTS) and compound selectivity profiling. These microarrays can hold more than 6000 individual reactions. Each reaction is 1000 to 10,000-fold smaller than those used in typical well plate forma ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This Phase II SBIR proposal describes the development of a prototype device for monitoring the presence of a number of hazardous chemicals in the air. This device is fundamentally different than typical spectroscopic instruments in that it uses enzyme-based plastics as sensing elements. Phase I showed that enzymatic plastics can be employed to continuously moni ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This Phase I, STTR application focuses on developing a novel brain molecular metabolomic biomarker for cognitive impairment in chronic alcoholism. Approximately one-half to two-thirds of recently detoxified chronic alcoholics have cognitive impairment. The molecular underpinnings for the cognitive impairment and why some chronic alcoholics became cognitively im ...