Gaining Understanding For Better Patient Outcomes
Body
Neurological trauma to the central and peripheral nervous system, such as traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, or peripheral nerve injury, can leave a patient with debilitating symptoms and permanently altered functionality.
Rehabilitation outcomes among this subset of patients vary dramatically, even among those with similar injuries. This variance presents an opportunity for therapeutic innovation: if the mechanisms of injury or repair in patients with good long-term outcomes were understood, it might be possible to reproduce them in other patients who currently endure poor outcomes.
The data uncovered in this study will allow us to better understand the individual patient factors affecting the recovery process after neurotrauma and hopefully empower us to predict and influence rehabilitation outcomes.
Therefore, this research project entails the deep clinical phenotyping and generation of thousands of unique induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines from neurotrauma patients who fall within the top or bottom quartile of inpatient rehabilitation outcomes based on ongoing chart review.
