Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Heart failure (HF) is a major health problem in the US and worldwide. Over 100,000 people in the US are diagnosed with end stage HF annually. Heart transplantation is performed in only 2% of these cases due to lack of available donor hearts. Mechanical left ventricular assist devices (LVADs, a type of artificial heart) can allow patients with severe HF to live ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This Phase I proposal details the rationale and the research plan for the synthesis and characterization of a polymeric delivery system that will deliver two anticancer drugs with diverse mechanisms of action simultaneously into ovarian cancer cells. The delivery system will be composed of N-(2-hydroxypropyl)methacrylamide (HPMA) copolymer as the backbone. It i ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Assessment and management of circulatory shock in critically ill patients requires rapid measurement of two critical variables: mixed venous oxyhemoglobin saturation (venous SO2) and total blood hemoglobin concentration [Hgb] to identify insufficient oxygen delivery and anemia and to determine the need for therapy with fluids, inotropic or vasodilator drugs or ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Premature, very-low-birth-weight (VLBW; d1500 g) and low-birth-weight (LBW; 1500-2499 g) infants are at increased risk for long-term encephalopathy. 25-50% of the 63,000 VLBW infants born annually in the U.S. have majorlong-term cognitive or neurobehavioral deficits. Postnatal cerebral ischemia appears to play an important role in long-term cognitive sequelae. ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In this small business technology transfer research (STTR) program, Omega Optics and the University of Texas at Austin propose to develop a planar lightwave circuit based surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) spectrometer for single molecule detection. The sensitivity of the SERS spectrometer comes from the 5-nm gap between gold nanowires, which can achieve ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The use of Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) for biomolecule detection has been restricted due to the great difficulty of fabricating ultrasensitive and reproducible surface-plasmonic-resonance (SPR) substrates.Therefore, detecting extremely small amount of biomolecules for clinical application is significantly limited. In this STTR Phase II research, w ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of this study is to develop a head tracking procedure for the automated assessment of hearing in infants using Visual Reinforcement Audiometry (VRA). The head tracking procedure will be incorporated into the Intelligent Visual Reinforcement Audiometry (IVRA) system from Intelligent Hearing Systems Corp. The IVRA system currently provides automa ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The capacity to evaluate the teratoma forming potential of differentiated embryonic stem cell populations represents an urgent need before widespread therapeutic application of these cells is possible. Researchers at Case Western Reserve University and BioInVision, Inc. will join together to create platform technologies for validating existing embryonic stem ce ...

DESCRIPTION: New therapeutic agents are urgently needed for the treatment of sickle cell disease (SCD), the world's most common genetic disease. Our long-term goal is to develop a drug for use in children that prevents the inexorable progression of SCD. SCD affects approximately 100,000 people in the United States and millions worldwide. It kills more children in Africa than HIV, but while HI ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Over the past decade, an investigation of how family members talk through cancer on the telephone has resulted in the recent publication of a lengthy volume entitled A Natural History of Family Cancer: Interactional Resources for Managing Illness (NH). Based on the conversations analyzed for this volume, and related research on the psychosocial impacts and con ...