Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a critical global public health problem, representing a major cause of death and disability, especially among young adults. Clinical assessment and imaging form the diagnostic cornerstones that are used to guide management and treatment decisions and predict the outcome for patients with TBI. However, due to the complexity of TBI phenotypes, this approach is insufficient to unveil the complex heterogeneity of TBI and to inform the development and implementation of effective precision medicine-based therapies. The use of blood-based biomarkers has substantial potential for improved non-invasive patient characterization to identify underlying interindividual pathophysiological variability and define more accurate disease phenotypes to guide personalized clinical management and identify new therapies. Over the past decades, promising brain injury protein markers have been integrated into clinical guidelines and cleared by the FDA-regulatory agency. However, the fact that such proteins are primarily byproducts of the injury-induced damage rather than intrinsic participants in pathological mechanisms has led to an increased interest in identifying additional novel ‘actionable’ biomarkers rooted in the disease pathogenesis. These ‘mechanistic’ biomarkers, which generate a detectable injury-specific molecular signature, could be informative and effectively used in clinical practice for both prognostication and endophenotyping and are ideal for optimizing drug development and clinical trial design. This mini-symposium discusses different approaches that could be employed to better identify TBI and related diseases.
When: Thursday, February 9, from 9:30AM to 2:00PM
Where: The Matador room in the Student Union Building
Who: TTU researchers Dr. Mohamed Fokar, Dr. Chiquito Crasto, and Dr. Fang Chen (Center for Biotechnology and Genomics, Lubbock, TX), and special guests Dr. Kevin Wang and Dr. Firas Kobeissy (Morehouse University, School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA), Dr. J. Josh Lawrence (TTUHSC School of Medicine, Dept. of Pharmacology and Neuroscience and Garrison Institute on Aging, Lubbock, TX), and Dr. Ahmed El-Yazbi (Alamein International University, Alamein, Egypt).
Buffet lunch will be provided.