Grant: Team Grant: NEURON

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) even mild (m)TBI in pediatric populations causes long-term functional deficits in 30% of patients, but to date we lack reliable tools to identify these patients. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop and validate new biomarkers for pediatric (p) mTBI. From the knowledge gathered in moderate/severe TBI, brain vasculature dysfunctions with, for example, bleeding and loss of cerebral blood flow (CBF) have been shown to be poor prognostic factors. However, there is little known about cerebral vascular changes after pmTBI. The aim of the current project is to validate the use of early CBF in patients to more accurately classify them. The project will also unravel the mechanisms resulting in these cerebrovascular changes in order to identify novel blood biomarkers like miRNA with the goal of understanding the prognostic potential for identifying long-term functional deficits after pmTBI. This will occur by establishing a translational consortium of internationally recognized experts in the field of brain injury using past data as well as generating new experimental data using state-of-the-art of clinical and preclinical techniques (from neuroimaging to molecular level with the use of machine learning).