pathoBIOLOGY OF TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY
Research in the Agoston Lab focuses on understanding the pathobiology of traumatic brain injury (TBI) through identifying biological markers of the TBI-induced disease processes.
Then physical forces of different kinds impact the brain, a complex biological response often called secondary injury process -follows. The combination of the initial -primary – injury and this biological response frequently result in long-term complications.
Repeated mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBIs), sometimes called concussions, including exposures to repeated sub-concussive blasts during heavy weapons trainings (HWT) cause not only short-term but frequently long-term neuropsychological disturbances. The Agoston Lab has been collaborating with military training sites and academic institutions nationally and internationally to identify the blood-based protein biomarker signature of repeated mTBIs and determine the correlation between blood-based protein biomarker data and functional/neurobehavioral performance. The goal is to provide clinicians with reliable, quantitative, objective metrics to help their decision-making process about long-term risks and guide potential therapeutical interventions.
Another complication of TBI is post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE) which affects ~25% of severe TBI patients. There are no treatments to prevent PTE nor are there ways to identify and prove such treatments. The Agoston Lab is a member of an NINDS funded international research consortium The Epilepsy Bioinformatics Study for Antiepileptogenic Therapy (EpiBioS4Rx) a large, international, multicenter Center without Walls (CWOW) type consortium. The Agoston Lab has been using various proteomic platforms and machine learning to identify the protein biomarker signature of the epileptogenic process with the long-term goal of designing and performing economically feasible full-scale clinical trials of antiepileptogenic therapies.
The work of the Agoston Lab has been reported in numerous peer reviewed publications, reviews and bookchapters. Dr. Agoston has given numerous lectures and presentations at national and international research conferences including IFBIC (International Forum on Blast Injury Countermeasures) where Dr. Agoston delivered a tutorial lecture on the biology of primary blast induced TBI. Dr. Agoston has organized and chaired symposia and gave lectures at the International Neurotrauma Society Meeting and at the Asian Australasian Congress of Neurological Surgeons, among others.