The U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command is leading a cooperative effort to leverage cutting-edge medical technology to develop new ways to assist service members who have suffered severe, disfiguring wounds.
The newly established Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, known as AFIRM, will be a virtual collaboration between the top scientists in the field guided by MRMC’s Institute of Surgical Research in San Antonio.
The regenerative institute is the brainchild of Col. Bob Vandre, director of Combat Casualty Care, who was amazed by the breakthroughs in regenerative science and how it could be applied to benefit Wounded Warriors.
‘‘We’ve gotten really good at keeping people alive,” said Vandre. ‘‘We want to move to the next step. Now that they’re alive, can we fix them?”
About 900 U.S. service members have undergone amputations of some kind due to injuries suffered in wartime service in Afghanistan or Iraq. Other troops have been badly burned or suffered spinal cord injuries or significant vision loss.
Riding on the forefront of science, AFIRM is expected to harness stem cell research and technology in finding innovative ways to use a patient’s natural cellular structure to reconstruct new skin, muscles and tendons, and even ears, noses and fingers.
‘‘The cells that we’re talking about actually exist in our bodies today,” said Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker said at a press briefing in April. ‘‘We, even as adults, possess in our bodies small quantities of cells which have the potential, under the right kind of stimulation, to become any one of a number of different kinds of cells.”
For example, Schoomaker said, the human body routinely regenerates bone marrow or liver cells.
AFIRM will have an overall budget of about $250 million for the initial five-year period, of which about $80 million will be provided by the Defense Department, Schoomaker said. Other program funding will be provided by the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md., the Department of Veterans Affairs, and local public and private matching funding.
Rutgers University, in N.J., Wake Forest University, in N.C., and 18 other universities will make up the consortia initiatives.
Dr. Anthony Atala, a surgeon and director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest, will be one of the lead scientists working with AFIRM. Atala’s current research concentrates on growing new human cells and tissue.
‘‘All the parts of your body, tissues and organs, have a natural repository of cells that are ready to replicate when an injury occurs,” Atala told reporters.
Medical technicians now can select cells from human donors and, through a series of scientific processes, can ‘‘regrow” new tissue.
‘‘Then, you can plant that (regenerated tissue) back into the same patient, thus avoiding rejection,” Atala added.
Special techniques are being developed to employ regrown tissue in the fabrication of new muscles and tendons, Atala observed, or for the repair⁄replacement of damaged or missing extremities such as noses, ears and fingers.
Continued advancement in regenerative medicine would greatly benefit those service members and veterans who’ve been severely scarred by war, Schoomaker said.
The three-star general cited animals like salamanders that can regrow lost tails or limbs. ‘‘Why can’t a mammal do the same thing?” he asked.
AFIRM is expected to start producing regenerative products within five years and is the largest concentration of scientific research in the field.
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