Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is the most common cause of chronic viral liver disease worldwide. More than 370 million people are chronically infected with HBV leading to nearly one million deaths annually as a result of cirrhosis, liver failure and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Currently available therapies against chronic HBV are expensive, require long-term admi ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this proposal is to develop and commercialize a novel approach for allergen specific immunotherapy as treatment for severe food allergy. Food allergy affects about 3.5% of the US population and 6% to 8% of young children. It is clearly on the rise. Peanut allergy, which affects around 1% of the population, is among the most severe food allergies, r ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Over 150 million people worldwide are infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV), which is an important cause of chronic liver disease. Current therapies are inadequate. Our long-term objective is to bring a new class of anti-HCV drugs to the clinic. We recently discovered and genetically validated a new target within the HCV non-structural protein NS4B, consist ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project entitled Identification of novel therapeutics for tuberculosis combining cheminformatics, diverse databases and logic-based pathway analysis describes the development of software that will facilitate new drug discovery efforts for Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB). The amount of research performed on TB co ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In this proposal we lay out a comprehensive research plan to evaluate our passive vaccination strategies targeting Staphylococcus aureus/MRSA to prevent or treat infections associated with S. aureus/MRSA. With the emergence of highly antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, most notably MRSA, new approaches for combating bacterial infections are desperately nee ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Osteoarthritis (OA) is the leading cause of chronic disability in the United States. A clinical goal in the treatment and prevention of OA is to develop replacement cartilage using tissue engineering (TE) technologies. Although TE cartilage presently lacks the mechanical stability of native cartilage, studies have demonstrated that mechanical stability can be e ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Menopause is associated with about a 10-15 pound weight gain and a redistribution of fat to the abdomen. The increase in abdominal fat, also known as visceral fat is known to produce cytokines that cause inflammation which can lead to the metabolic syndrome. The metabolic syndrome represents a major public health burden because it increases the risk of cardiova ...

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 ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Methamphetamine (MA) dependence is associated with neuropsychiatric side effects that make the addiction extremely challenging to treat. Patients seeking treatment experience ongoing impairments in cognition, mood, and motivation. Currently, there are no FDA-approved pharmacotherapies for MA dependence. The goal of this proof-of-concept research project is test ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Over 7.5 million high school students participate in high school sports programs and an additional 2 million students join these athletic teams each year. Adolescent athletes are at risk for using performance enhancing drugs, such as anabolic steroids, unregulated sport supplements, and illicit drugs and alcohol. Unfortunately, few evidence-based substance abus ...