Award Data

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): 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 ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal involves the development and validation of a novel approach to improve and accelerate the discovery of biopharmaceuticals (i.e. vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and other therapeutic proteins). Biopharmaceuticals are used to treat a variety of infectious and chronic diseases. The proposed research is intended to establish a new paradigm for rapidly ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Crystallization, followed by subsequent structure determination, is a major step in understanding the structure-function relationship of macromolecules. Understanding macromolecule structure has become a key part in the development of new pharmaceuticals, and is a major area of NIH research. Crystallization however is also the rate limiting step, despite techn ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Evidence and theory indicate that laboratory measures of impairment and function do not predict how older adults actually function in daily life. Thomas Glass (1998), for example, reports marked differences between functional activities that community residents can do and do do in survey data from the MacArthur Studies of Successful Aging. Therefore, subst ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Acute lung injury (ALI) and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) are characterized by a rapid and severe respiratory failure, arising after clinical events including major surgery, trauma, multiple transfusions and sepsis. ALI/ARDS have an associated mortality of 40-80% and current pharmacological modalities have been unsuccessful in decreasing mortality. ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Increasing evidence indicates that systemic inflammation and the blood-brain barrier (BBB), which becomes the target of overreacting or misguided immune cells that determine BBB failure and immune extravasations into the brain parenchyma, are involved in the pathogenesis of neurological diseases such as meningitis, inflammation, Alzheimer's disease, and multipl ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There is a compelling need to develop therapeutic approaches specifically designed to reduce neurological deficits after stroke. Human umbilical cord blood cells (HUCBCs) treatment dose-dependently improves functional outcome after stroke. UCBCs are associated with a lower risk of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), and UCBCs are younger than adult bone marrow st ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The liver is the site of many metabolic processes, including metabolism of xenobiotics such as pharmaceutical compounds. Drug metabolism is highly species specific and can vary significantly between individuals of the same species. To date no reliable experimental system capable of predicting the human-specific metabolic conversion of candidate small molecules ...