Bench to Bedside: Current Challenges in TBI Research

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) affects 1.7 million people each year, and of these injuries 52,000 result in death. Unfortunately, current TBI research has been relatively unsuccessful in developing possible drug treatments to counteract the secondary injuries which occur after the initial onset of injury. Therapeutic clinical trials targeting the pathophysiological mechanisms of TBI have been difficult to design and carry out because of three main challenges affecting the translation of basic research to clinical research: selecting an animal model that mimics all aspects of human TBI, the existence of narrow therapeutic concentration windows for neuroprotective agents, and identifying an effective therapeutic target (e.g., metabolic pathway) or pharmacological approach (e.g., route of administration).