Roadmap

Improved diagnostics for PTS and TBI will produce enormous benefits:

These domains will be explored within the following Disease-focused Programs:

1. Post-traumatic Stress
2. Traumatic Brain Injury
3. Suicidality

Our programs & projects will be managed tightly, with predetermined milestones and deliverables and with a core mission to create data and tools that are useful to as many researchers as possible.

The following Science & Technology Domains have been identified as part of our Initial Roadmap: 

• Large Scale Biomarker Research
• Biosensors
• Patient Networks & Mobile Health Assessment Platforms
• Information Technology & Knowledge Management
• Data Standards & Tools
• Computational Disease Modeling & Analytics
• Preclinical Models
• Brain & Tissue Repositories

Treatments Will Evolve as Our Understanding of Patient’s Disease is Enhanced by the Evolving Science

Paradigm Shift. We can make faster progress in understanding brain function and dysfunction across diseases by adopting a systems approach that redefines disease by mechanism across the human lifecycle.

The very bases by which we currently classify the heterogeneous array of conditions we call brain disorders, has been called into question.¹ Importantly, the current nosological categories fail to align with findings emerging from clinical neuroscience and genetics.² Additional many of our tools for assessment and diagnosis (e.g. scales & questionnaires) are relatively crude.³

As we transition from a descriptive to a mechanistic approach that reveals principles of cells, cellular networks, organs, and emergent behavior and their interactions across several spatial and temporal scales, we will need to embrace mathematical and computational approaches to help us integrate, interrogate and visualize data to enable knowledge discovery.

In the Systems Biology approach being championed by Cohen Veterans Bioscience, bioinformatics and computational biology are used to provide a research platform to acquire, manage, analyze, and display large amounts of data, allowing the research community to focus hypothesis-driven approaches only on the most promising avenues.

The essential and unique role that Cohen Veterans Bioscience can play to enable the Shift in Paradigm, articulated above, is to define a Roadmap for PTS and TBI, act as a Central Coordinating organization, connecting disparate organizations and efforts, serving as an integrator, and empirically testing and widely disseminating new models for biomarker testing and pre-clinical animal modeling as well as exploring the opportunities that new and emerging technologies provide.

Cohen Veterans Bioscience Programs are organized around the central goal of accelerating the time to cure for Veteran’s brain diseases and improving brain health.