The University of Texas at Austin recently became one of 11 public and private research universities in the United States to share in a $17 million Department of Defense research grant. The researchers will focus on prevention, treatment, and understanding of traumatic brain injuries – a fact that helps many experienced Texas traumatic brain injury lawyers feel hopeful for many of their clients.
The goals of the partnership include improving how clinical trials are run and developing better treatments for traumatic brain injury. Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) send 2.5 million Americans to the emergency room every year. Millions more, including many combat veterans and professional athletes, live with the ongoing effects of a severe injury that, currently, has no cure.
The five-year project will include work by UT Austin psychology professors Alex Valadka and David Schnyer. These researchers are working on collecting and organizing data from years of research on traumatic brain injuries. When their database is complete, researchers studying traumatic brain injuries will be able to analyze past information to learn more about causes, symptoms, and connections between TBI and other conditions. The data collected include information on genetics, imaging studies, psychological assessments, and other clinical information.
Other groups participating in the study will work alongside the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop better systems for choosing patients who can participate in clinical trials of TBI treatments. This project will also create better ways to track and measure how patients progress on experimental treatments, so that researchers can pinpoint effective treatment measures more quickly and thoroughly.