WBIC acute brain injury collaborative grant

A brain injury or disease changes the chemistry inside a person’s skull, and this team is building better scanners and chemical tests to track those changes in real time. The core problem is that current tools cannot see the molecular events—such as inflammation, cell death, or chemical imbalances—that unfold after a traumatic accident, a stroke, or during dementia. Without that detail, doctors cannot tell which patients will worsen, nor can they test whether a new drug is actually reaching its target inside the brain. This project closes that gap by developing both the imaging hardware and the chemical probes needed to measure brain chemistry non-invasively. If the work succeeds, it could transform how brain injuries and neurodegenerative diseases are diagnosed and treated. Instead of waiting for symptoms to appear or relying on crude scans, clinicians might one day see the molecular signature of a concussion or Alzheimer’s disease as it happens. This would allow faster, more targeted treatments and better clinical trials for new medicines. The research is primarily fundamental—advancing the tools of brain chemistry and imaging—but without such tool-building, the pipeline for new brain therapies stalls.