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Daemen College Awarded $857,000 from the United States Department of Defense Army Medical Research & Materiel Command (USAMRMC)
Funds for Collaboration With University at Buffalo and Roswell Park Cancer Institute: Focus on Research Related to Healing Wounds Caused by BurnsDaemen College has been awarded $857,000 from the United States Department of Defense, Army Medical Research & Materiel Command (USAMRMC). With this funding, faculty at Daemen College will continue their collaboration with researchers at the University at Buffalo and The Roswell Park Cancer Institute into the puzzle of healing patterns of both chronic and acute wounds. The USAMRMC award will fund research related to healing wounds caused by burns, and will build on current work being conducted by the Center for Wound Healing Research at Daemen College.
Skin burns remain a prevalent and costly public health issue in the United States and throughout the world. Annually, up to 2.8 per one thousand Americans will require an emergency room visit for burn injuries. In the early nineties, 1.25 million annual reported burn injuries resulted in approximately 5100 acute hospital admissions each year, with an accepted average length of stay of just under one hospital day for each 1% of total body surface area burned (at second degree or deeper).
“We are very appreciative of the high level of support that this project is receiving from elected officials and several notable trusts and foundations, as well as the business community,” stated Daemen President Dr. Martin J. Anisman. “We are especially grateful to Representative Tom Reynolds, for his multiple efforts in securing funding for this much-needed research. It is vital, not only because of the obvious importance of helping wound sufferers around the world, but also because it brings together a lot of good science.
“It also introduces students to cutting-edge technology, and gives them exposure to the health care processes in other countries – in Europe, and Asia, while exposing European and Asian students to how we approach these issues in the United States.”
Burns are among the most common injuries in modern conflicts. Military burn wounds may be the result of either combat or non-combat causes. In recent years the mortality of burn patients has significantly decreased due to early excision and more immediate skin grafting. However, with increased survivorship comes the risk of hypertrophic scarring, a common complication associated with healed deep burns; recent research has indicated that the incidence of hypertrophic scarring may be as high as 67% in burn survivors.
In Phase I of this project, researchers at the Daemen College Center for Wound Healing Research will adapt existing methodology to identify, quantitate, and characterize the wound conditions in patients that develop hypertrophic scarring, and those that do not. In Phase II, the Integrated Tissue Engineering Team of Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the University at Buffalo will utilize a new method of fluid/protein analysis termed PIXIES (Protein Imprinted Xerogels with Integrated Emission Sites).
“It was a good fit for our research group,” said Dr. Wesley Hicks, DDS, MD, FACS. Dr. Hicks, a nationally prominent head and neck surgeon at Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Professor of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery and Neurosurgery at the University at Buffalo, saw significant benefits in joining the Daemen project. “Our research is in both chronic and acute wound healing. By combining our two groups, we’re covering the entire spectrum of injury and repair in wound healing.”
“Dr. Hicks had been working on acute and chronic wounds for a long time and he had developed a significant pool of expertise,” Daemen Vice President for Academic Affairs Dr. Edwin Clausen noted. “When we met to discuss a collaboration, we realized that while the nature of the research we’ve been doing is different from his, his work and that being done by the Daemen Wound Research Center are complementary. Linking Daemen, UB, and Roswell Park makes this a much more powerful program.”
Dr. Hicks also noted that this research may result in benefits beyond the scope of wound healing, that “almost every aspect of medicine overlaps with rehabilitation medicine.” Because similar processes are involved, he explained, understanding how wounds heal after an injury could provide insight into why cells grow uncontrollably in cancer patients. The connections are also clear to Dr. Kristin Fries, Daemen College Associate Professor of Chemistry, who did postdoctoral work in immunology at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester. “I can apply a lot of what I did there to my work in the lab here,” she says.
The research also has important implications for treating wounded soldiers, not only because combat injuries can lead to pressure ulcers, but also because chronic wound research can lay the groundwork for better ways of treating burns sustained in explosions. That objective is a key reason the Department of Defense Army Medical Research & Materiel Command has provided funding for this research project, led by the Director of Daemen’s Natural & Health Sciences Research Center and Center for Wound Healing Research Dr. Laura Edsberg. This work will use samples from the wounds of soldiers who have been burned to study the biochemical changes that take place during healing.
Wound research at Daemen College also provides a focus for innovative teaching methods. A four-year grant of nearly half a million dollars from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) is underwriting a unique program involving Daemen and five other colleges. It uses the study of wounds to illustrate how biotechnology and various areas of science can all be brought to bear on a single problem. The cross-disciplinary approach draws on the expertise of faculty from several fields, combining clinical and scientific perspectives. Students from the six institutionsDaemen, New College of Florida, Pitzer College in California, and schools in Finland, Germany, and Irelandalso take part in a one-semester exchange program focusing on wound care.
The Natural and Health Sciences Research Laboratory at Daemen College has also been made possible in part through support from The George I. Alden Trust and The Edward J. Kavanaugh Foundation, and The James H. Cummings Foundation. The Center's research projects have additionally been awarded funding from Advanced Hyperbaric Technologies, Gaymar Industries, The James R. Hayward Research Fund, The National Science Foundation, and The New York Physical Therapy Association Research Designated Fund.