A $75 million Department of Defense grant to improve technologies to treat soldiers injured on the battlefield and advance care for the public will involve bioengineers at Rice University and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

The five-year Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM) grant announced today by the lead institution, the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, continues a program that began in 2008. Through AFIRM-II, researchers at Rice led by Antonios Mikos, a pioneer in the field of tissue engineering, and Kurt Kasper, a Rice faculty fellow in bioengineering, expect to advance the art of craniofacial reconstruction. The grant funds research at more than 45 academic institutions and industry partners.

From left, Alexander Tatara and Sarita Shah, students in the Baylor College of Medicine Medical Scientist Training Program, with Rice bioengineers Antonios Mikos and Kurt Kasper. The Rice team is part of a new Department of Defense grant to extend the AFIRM program for advanced technology to treat battlefield injuries. The students are engaged in Ph.D. studies in the Department of Bioengineering at Rice, after which they will complete their M.D. studies at Baylor College of Medicine. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
Regenerative medicine, which takes advantage of the body’s natural healing powers to restore or replace damaged tissue and organs, is one of many lines of research under investigation at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC).

“We’re very excited to have this opportunity to complete the work we started five years ago on the technologies we promised for the injured warrior,” said Mikos, director of the BRC-based Rice Center for Excellence in Tissue Engineering. He is the Louis Calder Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice.