The Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2018 Stepping Strong Breakthrough Awards.
Each year, the Stepping Strong Breakthrough Awards provides follow-on funding to previous Stepping Strong Innovator Award recipients who have shown promising results from their supported project. The following individuals received this year’s awards:
Sadly, mass casualty incidents due to terror attacks and natural disasters are on the rise. Eric Goralnick, MD, MS, and his team will address this deadly public health crisis with a two-pronged approach: applying lessons learned in the aftermath of mass casualty incidents and empowering civilians to stop the bleed.
Applying Lessons Learned. An important part of emergency preparedness is reviewing medical response to terror incidents and applying lessons learned following the incident. To that end, Goralnick and his collaborators have launched “GO Team,” whereby an international group of experts perform a standardized, academically rigorous, timely review of the response to an urban terror event. Current initiatives include a study of the terror attacks in Boston, Paris, and Brussels, and a focus group with 10 representative physicians from urban terror events around the globe, all with a goal of creating a recovery checklist for medical directors in the wake of these devastating occurrences.
Stopping the Bleed. Knowing that uncontrolled bleeding is a leading cause of mortality, Goralnick and his team launched several initiatives to empower laypeople as first responders in trauma settings. One is a study with civilian and military researchers to determine the most effective methods for training laypeople to apply tourniquets; another is a follow-up evaluation to determine retention of skills; and a third involves a consensus-driven national bleeding control research agenda to facilitate best practices. With funding from the Stepping Strong Breakthrough Award, Goralnick’s team has trained 560 employees at Gillette Stadium in emergency response. The team aspires to bring the training program to sports arenas across the country.
More than 500,000 patients in the U.S. suffer from skeletal muscle loss caused by traumatic injuries, including gunshots or blast injuries suffered on the battlefield. Muscle wounds with more than 20 percent muscle mass loss incur a decrease in function due to impaired muscle regeneration, which serves to restrict motion. Currently, there is no clinical standard of care for volumetric muscle loss (VML), and treatment options are limited. Long-term solutions are therefore required to address the shortcomings of current therapies.
The goal of this project is to develop a reliable, effective, and customizable method to place an implantable scaffold capable of addressing the unmet need of patients recovering from VML. Indranil Sinha, MD, and his team are utilizing a custom-built, hand-held printer for 3D printing of the scaffold directly onto the injured muscle wound bed. The handheld printer is robust and can be used in any setting without the need to access an expensive imaging modality. It can even be used in settings without the physical presence of the surgeon, such as during prolonged and en route care of the patient.
With funding from the Stepping Strong Breakthrough Award, the team’s objective is to demonstrate that accelerated muscle formation and integration can be achieved by implanting a hydrogel, impregnated with growth factors, using a pen printer. In addition to potentially improving muscle recovery, the device is small and will minimize response time to traumatic VML injuries.
Amid a critical gap in trauma research funding, The Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation catalyzes multidisciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration to transform care for civilian and military heroes recovering from traumatic injury.
Learn more about the work we fund and stay connected to future Breakthrough Award opportunities.
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