The Division of Surgical Sciences Smita Nair, PhD, Professor in Surgery, and Bruce Sullenger, PhD, Professor in Surgery, have been named recipients of a grant awarded by the US Department of Defense for their project titled, “Elucidating and mitigating the effects of Damage Associated Molecular Patterns (DAMPs) released following severe traumatic injury.”
A cross-collaboration with Duke Department of Emergency Medicine’s, John Eppensteiner, MD, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, the team was established to research effective ways in treating patients with seemingly similar traumatic injuries, but with differing outcomes. Some patients recover well while others have complications. They have found that the common denominator is prolonged inflammation.
They aim to study inflammation in the context of traumatic injuries from multiple valuable and intertwined perspectives. These perspectives include Dr. Sullenger’s specialty in molecular biology, Dr. Nair’s in immune response mechanisms, and Dr. Eppensteiner’s in patient outcome.
The grant award from the US Department of Defense will not only help bring these three perspectives together, but will also provide the bio-sample bank from Allan D. Kirk’s, MD, PhD, Department of Surgery Chair, SC2i project. This will allow the team to explore why outcomes differ between trauma patient injuries and if there are distinct patterns of inflammation signatures associated with bad outcomes.
The success of this research will help shed more light on these inflammation patterns and will help the researchers determine what steps they can therapeutically manipulate to reduce inflammation so that patients’ immune systems will move on to the healing phase faster and result in better outcomes.