December 7, 2001
Modern medical care has made a huge difference in the survival rate of patients suffering from serious burns and other traumatic injuries. But for many patients, recovery still can be a long and difficult process that includes the risk of serious, possibly fatal complications. Earlier this fall, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) awarded to a consortium of investigators a $6.7 million grant to investigate factors that may control recovery from traumatic injury, with the ultimate aim of developing improved treatment strategies. The grant is the first stage in what is projected to be overall support of $37 million for a five-year project.
Leading
this project is Ronald G. Tompkins, MD, ScD, (pictured left)
director of the MGH Sumner Redstone Burn Center and chief of the MGH Trauma
Service. "We know that patients recovering from trauma go through
a characteristic sequence of physiologic changes involving the immunoinflammatory
system," he says. "We want to better understand those changes
and, we hope, identify proteomic [protein] and genomic markers that could
predict which patients are at greater risk for serious problems."'
Inflammation is a common activity of the body's immune system, occurring in response to infection and injury. Usually a controlled activity that protects and heals an injured area, inflammation can escalate out of control and lead to the life-threatening, body-wide infection called sepsis or to multi-organ failure syndrome. Burn and trauma patients are among those at greatest risk for uncontrolled inflammation.
The research group will investigate how the immune system responds to serious injury, including an examination of the contribution of genetic elements. Tompkins adds that the activation of normal genes also may be changed by the body's response to injury; understanding those changes is another goal of the research project. The team hopes to develop standard operating procedures to treat burn and trauma patients and to encourage the use of those procedures in trauma centers across the country.
Other MGH researchers involved with the project are: Frederick Ausubel, PhD; Joseph Avruch, MD; Mason Freeman, MD; David Schoenfel, PhD; Brian Seed, PhD; Mehmet Toner, PhD; and Martin Yarmush, MD, PhD.
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