The Human Subjects Core provides the Burn Trauma Center with clinical, physiologic, pathophysiologic, and outcomes data to promote the analysis and interpretation of the multiple metabolic interactions in patients with a burn-induced immuno-inflammatory hypermetabolic response. It serves as a tool to establish a clinical infrastructure for study design, and accrual and analysis of data from critically ill patients. An advancement from this core is the establishment and dissemination of guidelines, tools, and standard operating procedures (SOPs), which can be accessed and utilized by investigators in the field of burns and trauma. The study of bum-injured patients and healthy volunteers is essential to our understanding of the human response to injury. This activity requires careful oversight and quality control to maintain maximum safety and patient protection and to insure high quality data collection. The Human Subjects Core personnel allow complex human studies to be performed at each of our study locations: the Burn Centers at the MGH and SHC, the MGH PET Camera Facility, the MGH general surgical units, and the MIT General Clinical Research Facility. The core acts most efficiently to prevent duplicate and unnecessary blood drawing and testing. To anticipate maximum coordination of research efforts and close cooperation among investigators, human study information obtained from our studies on the clinical units is effectively coordinated and organized in this core facility, thus providing an efficient mechanism of data management. Establishment of a separate human studies core within the P50 funding mechanism provides an excellent opportunity to consolidate acquisition and management of the human subjects for the first three projects. The Human Subjects Core is responsible for the development and implementation of standard operating procedures (SOPs), recruitment and obtaining consent of subjects, collection and distribution of samples, record-keeping, and coordination with the subprojects. This core allows the human research performed in our Burn Trauma Center to be conducted with remarkable accuracy, sensitivity, and reproducibility.
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