Military Medical Research

Partnering with NDRI made sense for us. By leveraging their post-mortem recovery capabilities, we were able to better maximize the donation opportunities of our registered amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients/veterans to support biomedical research. ”

- Christopher Brady, PhD, Co-Principal Investigator and Director of Scientific Operations
   VA Biorepository Brain Bank, VA Boston Healthcare System

Supporting Military Medical Research

NDRI has the infrastructure, capacity, and experience to accelerate military medical research by serving as a consistent source of human biospecimens. We provide human biospecimens ethically sourced from all body systems for small to large-scale projects with varying degrees of complexity. Biospecimens are collected and preserved using standardized methods and best practices.

Nationwide access to diseased and normal tissue

The first step toward obtaining high-quality human tissue for use in Military Medical Research is to identify a history of war-related illness relevant to the experimental needs of the investigator. Our partnering tissue source sites cover all major geographic catchment areas in the United States, thereby maximizing the number and type of potential donors available to support the Department of Defense (DoD) research. It is through this capability that NDRI provides access to a wide range of donor demographics, and the full spectrum of donors with disease states or conditions including:

• blunt force trauma/TBI
• HIV/ hepatitis
• ALS/Parkinson's disease
• substance abuse
• hearing and vision loss
• thermal burns
• environmental exposure

NDRI also has experience working with the DoD and Department of Veterans Affairs funded programs to build and manage donor registries of patients diagnosed with ALS and PTSD. NDRI collaborates with these military stakeholders to identify and consent eligible donors who have expressed interest in gifting their organs and tissues for research, and to coordinate organ and tissue recovery at the time of death, or in-life, at the time of surgery.

NDRI is proud to share some of our recent presentations at national scientific symposiums and conferences. The below presentations highlight our programs, services, and ground-breaking research by NDRI investigators in the military research field. These posters were presented at the Military Health Science Research Symposium in 2019.

•  Accelerating Military Medical Research via Project-driven Human Biospecimen Collection and Analysis
• Physiological Analysis of Human Dorsal Root Ganglia Provides a Promising Approach to Accelerating Translational Pain Research
• Management and Treatment of Warfighter Neuromusculoskeletal Injuries-A Human Joint Model System to Study the Pathogenesis and Treatment of Post-Traumatic Osteoarthritis

To learn more fill out our application below or contact Strategic Initiatives:
partnering@ndriresource.org, 800-222-NDRI (6374), ext. 289