Project Grant R43AG065066

This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Aging's Aging Research program (CFDA 93.866) provides $2,181,250 in funding to the Seattle Institute For Biomedical And Clinical Research to develop small molecule inhibitors of the MSUT2 protein as a potential therapeutic approach for treating tauopathy disorders such as frontotemporal lobar degeneration, Alzheimer's disease, and related conditions. The project aims to optimize potent and brain-penetrant MSUT2 inhibitors and demonstrate...

This Phase I SBIR project, awarded by the National Institute on Aging (CFDA 93.866 Aging Research), aims to identify small molecule compounds that can bind to and modify the biology of monomeric and oligomeric tau protein. The goal is to ultimately block or reduce the toxicity of tau, which is associated with Alzheimer's disease and other tauopathies. The awardee, Jillion Therapeutics Inc., will utilize a novel DNA-encoded library (DEL) drug discovery platform to screen a large library of over...

This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Aging's Aging Research Federal Grant Program (CFDA 93.866) provides $371,919 to the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston to develop and validate a high-throughput screening assay for identifying tau aggregation inhibitors for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. The project aims to adapt a protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) assay to create a robust, reproducible, and high-throughput screening test to find drug...

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) received a $424,095 Project Grant award from the National Institute on Aging (CFDA 93.866 - Aging Research) to develop a CRISPR/Cas13 gene therapy targeting the tau protein for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease and other tauopathies. The project aims to identify and validate optimal guide RNAs to deplete specific tau isoforms in neurons, and evaluate the therapeutic potential of this approach in preclinical Alzheimer's disease mouse...

This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Aging (CFDA 93.866 Aging Research) provides $431,750 to deliver an immuno-gene therapy targeting oligomeric tau proteins, a key driver of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease and related tauopathies. The project aims to develop and validate a single-chain antibody fragment (scFv) derived from the anti-tau oligomeric complex 1 (TOC1) antibody, which will be packaged into a recombinant adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector for systemic,...

This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Aging (CFDA 93.866 - Aging Research) provides $499,911 to Aeton Therapeutics Inc. to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of their anti-tau monoclonal antibody treatment, AT-01, for Alzheimer's disease. The key objectives are to 1) compare the in vitro performance of AT-01 against another anti-tau antibody, HJ8.7, in neural cells and organoids, and 2) assess the efficacy and safety of AT-01 versus HJ8.7 in a mouse tauopathy model,...

The U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA) awarded a $506,451 Project Grant (CFDA 93.866 - Aging Research) to 3P Biotechnologies, Inc., a for-profit biotechnology company, to develop a targeted exosomal delivery system for small interfering RNA (siRNA) therapeutics to mitigate neuroinflammatory diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. The project aims to optimize the delivery of siRNA against the inflammatory regulator NF-kB using folic acid-functionalized exosomes derived from bovine colostrum....

This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Aging's Aging Research program (CFDA 93.866) provides $1,015,163 to Baylor College of Medicine to develop a high-throughput in vivo CRISPR/Cas9 screening method to identify regulators of tau protein levels in mouse brains. The project aims to bypass labor-intensive in vitro cell-based screens and directly identify brain-specific therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. The screening method will be applied to a...

The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston will research immunotherapy targeting tau aggregate polymorphs under a $4.02 million project grant from the National Institute on Aging's Aging Research program (CFDA 93.866). The three-year award will support determining the efficacy of four monoclonal antibodies in targeting disease-relevant tau oligomeric strains/polymorphs implicated in neurodegenerative tauopathies like Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Researchers...

This Project Grant award of $553,998.00 from the National Institute on Aging (CFDA 93.866 - Aging Research) supports the University of Notre Dame's research to develop a macrocyclic peptide platform for discovering functional tau epitopes related to neurodegenerative diseases. The key objectives are to: 1) synthesize a library of conformationally constrained macrocyclic peptides ("mini-Taus") based on the structures of 4R tauopathic filaments, and evaluate their ability to seed...