Congratulations to Dr. Angela Gibson from our Division of Acute Care and Regional General Surgery, who was recently awarded a five-year, $1.375 million research grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences!
The study will focus on tissue necrosis, a form of cell death, when diagnosing and treating burn injuries. Dr. Gibson and her research team aim to develop new methods that will help burn surgeons more accurately detect both dead tissue and tissue vital to the healing process. By investigating a medical dye that glows differently for both dead tissue and living tissue, Dr. Gibson and her team hope to improve the diagnosis and treatment of burn wounds, which, when using only simple visual inspection, is currently only 60-70% accurate. In turn, they hope to decrease excessive surgery in the nearly 500,000 people who experience a burn injury every year.
The NIGMS is one of the National Institutes of Health and “supports basic research that increases understanding of biological processes and lays the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.”