Traumatic Brain Injury: Transforming the Clinical Care Model
Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a Significant Public Health Burden
What is Traumatic Brain Injury?
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) results from a bump or jolt to the head that disrupts normal brain function. TBIs can range from mild, with a brief change in mental status or consciousness (commonly called concussions), to severe, with an extended period of unconsciousness or memory loss.
Symptoms of TBI
Individuals commonly report sleep disturbances, headaches, dizziness, sensitivity to light and noise, fatigue, depression, anxiety, inability to concentrate, impaired decision making, memory lapse, and personality changes.
Barriers to Effective Treatment
Despite decades of promising research and more than $1.1 billion spent on clinical trials, no therapeutics for TBI have successfully advanced to FDA approval. Each person experiences brain trauma differently but the field has been stymied by a one-size-fits all approach and lack of objective tools to effectively diagnose TBI.
Precision Solutions
Advancements will require an approach based on each person’s unique biology which will bring us closer toward realizing more personalized treatments.
The Brain Trauma Blueprint: a Framework for Advancing More Personalized Treatments
Building a roadmap to realize the first generation of treatments for TBI
The Brain Trauma Blueprint (BTB) is a framework that enables stakeholders from across the brain trauma research field to advance precision diagnostics and treatments for brain trauma through a coordinated effort.
Through a 12-step process, the BTB engages the research community to bridge translational research gaps in TBI and advance a new generation of diagnostics and personalized therapeutics.
Learn more about the Brain Trauma Blueprint and sign up for updates.
CVB is Driving Progress to Advance Precision Solutions for TBI through a variety of programs
Making advancements will require a treatment approach based on each person’s unique biology to bring us closer toward realizing effective and personalized treatments. CVB has been at the forefront of advancing our understanding of and treatment for TBI as well as advocating for the millions of suffering people and their loved ones.
As part of the Brain Trauma Blueprint initiative, CVB has initiated partnerships and published five of six anticipated reports in peer-reviewed journals where experts examine different aspects of TBI.
Outlining Opportunities, Barriers, and Recommendations for Advancing TBI Treatment Solutions
Publication 1: Open-source tool, Phenobench, developed to enable researchers to evaluate TBI data across different studies
To understand the challenges of individual differences and disease progression trajectories for TBI care, the authors of the first Brain Trauma Blueprint publication in the Journal of Neurotrauma—Phenotyping the Spectrum of Traumatic Brain Injury: A Review and Pathway to Standardization—describe the current research on approaches to patient phenotyping. Also discussed are new methods such as unsupervised machine-learning, a type of artificial intelligence that looks for patterns and similarities across vast amounts of data without knowing the clinical outcomes.
Learn more about this publication
Identifying Population Differences is Critical to Improving Lives of People with TBI
Publication 2: Identifying population differences is critical to improving the lives of those suffering from the chronic effects of TBI
Authored by leading experts across the TBI field, the second paper in the series, Epidemiology of Chronic Effects of Traumatic Brain Injury, explores how factors like age, race, and co-existing conditions influence TBI outcomes across populations and how these differences can help standardize precision solutions.
Improving Preclinical Models to Advance TBI Research
Publication 3: Recommendations for the Advancement of Preclinical Science in TBI
In the third paper in the series, Roadmap for Advancing Preclinical Science in Traumatic Brain Injury, TBI experts reviewed the state of preclinical research in TBI, how preclinical models contribute to the success and failure of clinical solutions, and considerations for their improvement to aid translational science.
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Implementing Diagnosis and Treatment Guidelines for TBI
Publication 4: Traumatic Brain Injury: Strategies for Implementing Diagnosis and Treatment Guidelines
Published in the Journal of Neurotrauma, the article reviews factors that impact adoption and implementation of best practices for the management of traumatic brain injury (TBI). It also examines enablers of implementation and strategies for mitigating the barriers to optimal uptake.
Understanding TBI Biomarkers to Advance Personalized Treatments
Publication 5: Traumatic Brain Injury: A Framework to Advance Biomarker Development for Diagnosis, Outcome Prediction, and Treatment
Published in the Journal of Neurotrauma, the article focuses on the pressing need for multi-modal biomarkers for traumatic brain injury to guide the development of diagnostics and personalized, targeted therapies.
Learn more about this publication
Fostering Collaboration Across the TBI Research Community
Cohen Veterans Bioscience, Stanford Brain Performance Center, and Brain Trauma Foundation Join Forces to Advance Precision Medicine for TBI
Cohen Veterans Bioscience, Stanford Brain Performance Center, and the Brain Trauma Foundation announced a collaboration aimed at transforming the treatment recommendations and guidelines for mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) (inclusive of concussion) and advancing the field more broadly toward a precision medicine approach.
Normative Neuroimaging Library (NNL): Developing effective clinical imaging tools for diagnosing TBI
CVB is creating an Imaging Reference Library essential to the development of effective clinical imaging tools for diagnosing and managing patients with TBI.
Advanced MRI imaging can now detect microscopic changes in brain structure and/or function caused by trauma or disease. By performing standardized MRI scans on 3,000 adult volunteers who have not been affected by brain trauma or disease, we are forming a library that documents normal population variation as measured by these advanced MRI methods.
Advocacy: Improving The Lives of People Affected by TBI
CVB advocates to improve the lives of people affected by TBI at the federal, state and local levels.
Virtual Briefing: A path forward – identifying solutions for recognized gaps in TBI diagnostics and treatment
We recently co-hosted a virtual briefing with the American Brain Coalition in cooperation with the Congressional Neuroscience Caucus and the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force. The briefing presented findings from the Brain Trauma Blueprint 2019 State of the Science Summit and progress on activities aimed at addressing the roadmap recommendations.
Sign Up for Our Newsletter and Receive Our Five Year Roadmap to Transform Concussion Care
Learn about our plan to advance tailored treatments for traumatic brain injury in this brochure (PDF format).
