Understanding the Biomechanics of Traumatic Brain Injury to Find Treatments for the Injured

Images of various preparations used to study traumatic brain injury in Barclay Morrison's laboratory. Left: a mixed culture of brain cells

stained for neurons (green) and auxiliary brain cells (red). Center: a hippocampal slice stained for inhibitory neurons (green). Right: a living

hippocampal culture on a microelectrode array (black dots) to record neuronal activity after injury.

Barclay Morrison, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, compares the brain's physical response to traumatic brain injury to, of all things, a gelatin dessert.

If you take a bowl of Jell-O and spin it rapidly, it wiggles inside the confines of the bowl, and as it wiggles, it stretches without changing volume, just like the brain, he says.

All it takes is 40 milliseconds to sustain a life-changing brain injury. That blow to the heador mechanical stimulus, as scientists call itsets in motion a cascade of biological responses inside the skull responsible for the injury's devastating consequences.

There are more than 1.7 million head injuries in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, but no treatment as yet for the progressive damage from brain trauma that can lead to disorders ranging from memory loss to Parkinsons, Alzheimers and epilepsy.

Morrison and his team are tackling the problem by exploring the biomechanics of the brain and its response on a biological level to traumatic brain injury.

In his laboratory in Engineering Terrace, Morrison takes a silicone substrate, a flexible disk the thickness of a fingernail, cultures living brain tissue on it and stretches it over a metal tube to simulate the deformation of the brain during an injury. He tests how far tissue can stretch before neurons die and whether drug therapies can prevent cell death, with the ultimate goal of slowing or stopping the damage. Hes also studying the hippocampus, the region most vulnerable to brain injury and responsible for memory and learning, as well as the cortex, the largest part of the brain.

His lab has made progress recently on repetitive head injurieswhen an initial injury causes little apparent damage but a subsequent blow soon after results in substantial harm. In research presented at the 2012 National Neurotrauma Symposium, Morrison showed that brain tissue after an initial injury treated with estrogen and memantine (a drug that is also used to treat Alzheimers symptoms) appeared to be more resistant when subjected to a second injury the next day. Were looking at treatments to break the synergy between two injuries, Morrison says.

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Understanding the Biomechanics of Traumatic Brain Injury to Find Treatments for the Injured