Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): An increasing variety of diseases are being shown to be due to immunological processes, including diabetes, and now Alzheimer's disease (AD). AD is the most prevalent age-associated disease and growing evidence suggeststhat aspects of the innate immune system play a major role its progression. Based on this evidence, we propose a new approach to the treatm ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The broad long-term of this project is to develop methods for evaluation of adherence to intravaginal microbicide therapy for the prevention of HIV transmission. Correct determination of adherence to preventative therapies in clinical trials is essential to accurate evaluation of efficacy. A better understanding of the true adherence to a preventative therapy w ...

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): In the last decade, Acinetobacter baumannii has emerged as one of the most highly antibiotic-resistant pathogens in the United States (US) and throughout the world. These infections are increasingly prevalent and highlylethal, killing 50-60% of those infected. Worse, strains of A. baumannii that no known antibiotic will kill have now emerged, and will continue ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Identification and Validation of Targets of Phenotypic High Throughput Screening Hits for Chagas Disease Project Summary Nearly 10 million people in Latin America are infected with the eukaryotic parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) classifies Chagas disease as a neglected tropical disease, but C ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): State of the art techniques result in 10-year solid organ graft loss of up to 80% in cardiopulmonary organ transplantation, and re-transplantation is often not possible. Establishment of donor-specific immunological tolerance (DSIT), a condition in which a recipient accepts a transplant without immunosuppression, while retaining the ability to fight infections, ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Up to 170 million people worldwide are chronically infected with HCV Hepatitis C virus (HCV) putting the infected individuals at significant risk for cirrhosis, liver failure and liver cancer. End- stage liver diseasecaused by HCV is the leading indication of liver transplantation (LT) in the United States. However, reinfection with HCV occurs universally and ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Despite advances in the development of HIV drugs there remains a need for new therapies. Toxicities associated with long term use of many of the approved HIV drugs coupled with the development of resistance drives the need for new and novel antivirals. Maturation inhibitors (MIs) represent one such class of HIV therapies. HIV maturation inhibitors block virus r ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Bacterial interference creates an ecological competition between commensal bacteria and pathogenic species. Like microbial competition via fermentation in a ripening fruit, bacterial interference via fermentation has been found in the deep-seated skin abscesses where is an anaerobic microenvironment, allowing bacteria to ferment carbohydrates to short-chain fa ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): While there is no doubt smoking is a direct causative factor underlying the development of lung cancer, not every smoker develops lung cancer. In fact, only 10-15% of smokers develop this disease, indicating that otherfactors make certain individuals more susceptible to cancer. A number of single nucleotide polymorphisms are known to correlate with the developm ...