Traumatic Brain Injury Research Advances with $18.8M NIH Award

The National Institutes of Health is awarding $18.8 million over five years to support worldwide research on concussion and traumatic brain injury.

The NIH award, part of one of the largest international research collaborations ever coordinated by funding agencies, will be administered through UC San Francisco.

The award supports a team of U.S. researchers at more than 20 institutions throughout the country who are participating in the International Traumatic Brain Injury (InTBIR) Initiative, a collaborative effort of the European Commission, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).

Although the potential long-term harms due to concussions and blows to the head have gained more attention recently due in part to media coverage of the experiences of athletes and of soldiers returning from the Middle East traumatic brain injuries, or TBI, that results from automobile crashes or other common accidents impacts many more people.

Many of those who are affected by TBI are never diagnosed, according to UCSF neurosurgeon Geoffrey Manley, MD, PhD, a principal investigator for the grant who will serve as the U.S. research teams primary liaison to the NIH,and thechief of neurosurgery at the UCSF-affiliated San Francisco General Hospital, a Level-1 trauma center.SFGH wasthe first medical center in the nation to achievecertificationfrom the Joint Commission for the treatment of TBI.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 2 percent of the U.S. population now lives with TBI-caused disabilities, at an annual cost of about $77 billion.

Each year in the United States, at least 1.7 million people seek medical attention for TBI, Manley said. It is a contributing factor in a third of all injury-related deaths.

In the work funded by the NIH grant which also is supported by contributions from the private sector and from the nonprofit One Mind for Research the researchers aim to refine and improve diagnosis and treatment of TBI, which often has insidious health effects, but which frequently is undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, inadequately understood and undertreated, according to Manley.

After three decades of failed clinical trials, a new approach is needed, Manley said. We expect that our approach will permit researchers to better characterize and stratify patients, will allow meaningful comparisons of treatments and outcomes, and will improve the next generation of clinical trials. The work will advance our understanding of TBI and lead to more effective, patient-specific treatments.

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Traumatic Brain Injury Research Advances with $18.8M NIH Award