Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The worldwide demographic trends of aging and obesity will increase the global incidence of blinding eye diseases, which impose significant psychosocial and economic burdens. The leading cause of blindness in the developed world is Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), which causes the progressive loss of central vision. Because dry AMD, which exhibits gradua ...

ABSTRACT The long-term product goal of this project is a small molecule therapeutic for choroidal neovascularization (CNV, the hallmark of wet age-related macular degradation), an abnormal growth of blood vessels in the choroid layer of the eye that results in damage to the retina and consequent blindness. Our lead compound is the natural product sterculic acid, which has been shown to inhibit ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Radikal Therapeutics (RTX) is developing a revolutionary bifunctional small molecule (R-801) for topical therapy of primary open angle glaucoma (POAG). R-801 is constructed from the covalent fusion of 2 chemical domains, each with demonstrated tissue protective properties: 1) a mito-K+-ATP channel activating moiety derived from the isoform non-selective K+-ATP ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Monoclonal antibodies are used for treatment of a wide range of diseases from cancer to infectious diseases. However, development of antibodies with high affinity and specificity is still time-consuming, labor-intensiveand unpredictable. Abzyme Therapeutics LLC is actively developing animal-free antibody discovery platforms to accelerate generation of therapeut ...

Abstract High throughput screening assays for GPCR drug discovery are hampered by the complex instrumentation associated with current technologies, and the high risk of false-positives and off- target effects. The majority of currently available GPCR drugscreening assays are end-point assays that rely on secondary reporters of GPCR signaling events after signaling has occurred. These assays are fu ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The perioral route for drug administration remains the most convenient way of clinical therapy and is preferred by patients, however, good bioavailability is a necessary characteristic of new candidate therapeutics. A key parameter for determining oral bioavailability is drug transport and permeability across the small intestine (SI) epithelium. Therefore, in ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Aquilus Pharmaceuticals, Inc. proposes to evaluate the effects of a proprietary matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) inhibitor, AQU-010, for blocking neuropathic pain and morphine tolerance in a thermal injury (TI) rat model.The goals for Phase I are to scale-up the synthesis of AQU-010, determine its oral pharmacokinetics (PK) and target tissue penetration and then ...

ABSTRACT In this project we propose to exploit the recent successful isolation and reconstitution of the important ATP- dependent drug efflux transporter, ABCG2 (BCRP, Breast Cancer Resistance Protein), and combine it with a new transport assay system, the Fluorosome platform, to characterize the interaction of ABCG2 with drugs and drug candidates. The result will provide a useful, novel, highly ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There is enormous potential of oligonucleotides (ON) as therapeutics, but the challenge remains how to effectively deliver ON into cells. Currently, there are no effective and reliable ways of delivery. Outer cell membranes resist the cellular uptake of charged ON, and charges-eliminating backbone modifications such as those in peptide nucleic acids (PNA) and m ...

Project Summary The goal of this SBIR project is to design and develop an efficient, automation- compatible Directed Cell Migration (DCM) 96-well Assay that distinguishes chemokinetic from chemotactic behavior. Cell migration is currently assayed using trans-membrane well inserts, microfluidic systems and various versions of scratch assays. These methods are expensive and provide inconsistent dat ...