Thayer School Joins Effort to Treat War Wounded

Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth has been awarded a place in the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM)—a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary network striving to develop advanced treatment options for severely wounded U.S. servicemen and women. The principal investigator at Thayer School is Joseph Rosen, adjunct professor of engineering and professor of surgery in the Division of Plastic Surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

“This new program will provide state-of-the-art technologies to help the wounded in the present wars,” says Rosen. “It will also have long-term dual use for civilian-related problems.”

Managed and funded through the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command—with additional funding from the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the National Institutes of Health, and the Veterans Administration—the AFIRM is made up of two “cores”: the Rutgers University and Cleveland Clinic-led core, and the Wake Forest University-led core. Each of the two civilian cores is itself a multi-institutional network with Thayer School acting as part of the Rutgers-Cleveland Clinic core. Each core was awarded $42.5 million over a period of five years.

The AFIRM was designed to speed the delivery of regenerative medicine therapies for critically injured service members from around the world, with a focus on those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Researchers will be investigating new therapies, such as tissue engineering, to develop innovative healing methods.

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