Last week, a group from UAB’s Center for Injury Science (CIS) met with colleagues in Houston for the first investigator meeting for a large-scale upcoming trauma clinical trial.
CIS, together with the School of Public Health at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, was awarded $8.8 million last year by the National Institutes of Health to conduct the Trauma Resuscitation with Low-Titer Group O Whole Blood or Products, or TROOP, trial.
CIS is the Clinical Coordinating Center for the trial, while the Data Coordinating Center is in Houston.
TROOP will be conducted at 13 leading Level I trauma centers in the U.S. and is the first large-scale clinical trial evaluating whole blood in injured patients. TROOP will demonstrate whether hemorrhaging trauma patients who receive whole blood have improved mortality compared to those who receive component therapy.
If shown to be effective, treatment with whole blood could transform the standard of care for bleeding trauma patients and save many lives.
Jan Jansen, MBBS, Ph.D., FRCS, Director of CIS and one of the trial’s principal investigators, called the investigator meeting a “big milestone” and said the purpose was to prepare sites to operationalize the trial in their locations.
Sites will be starting the Community Consultation and Public Disclosure process (since this is an Exception from Informed Consent trial), and Jansen expects the first sites to begin enrollment this summer.
TROOP will enroll 1,100 patients over a period of three years.
The group representing UAB included:
- Jan Jansen, MBBS, Ph.D., FRCS (Principal Investigator)
- John Holcomb, M.D., FACS (Principal Investigator)
- Shannon Stephens, EMTP, CCEMTP (Program Director)
- Jill Richter, Ph.D.
- Karen Brown
- Joel Rodgers
- Emily Turner
- Marisa Marques, M.D.
- LaKecia Watkins
- Tammy Gray
Learn more about the TROOP trial here, and more about Exception from Informed Consent, or EFIC, trials here.