The Glue Grant program has generated the largest human dataset to date, and likely for the foreseeable future, on the human genomic response to injury in circulating blood leukocytes and three highly enriched blood leukocyte populations, providing a unique opportunity for data mining toward improving understanding the mechanism(s) of inflammation and injury as well as better prediction of patient recovery trajectories. Coupled with the genomic data is the most complete set of clinical, demographics, and outcomes data ever compiled in injury research. Data from the Trauma Related Data Base has generated more than 110 publications, representing just the tip of the iceberg for data mining the most comprehensive data set linking high quality genomics and proteomics data with clinical outcomes after blunt trauma or massive burns.
Read MoreThe clinical populations
Large-scale, multi center studies involving the enrollment of large numbers of patients, of all ages, with consistent tracking of clinical and epidemiological data has been demonstrated many times to be challenging. The Glue Grant program overcame these challenges to create an extensive database on patient characteristics, extent of injuries, clinical treatment, mortality, complications, and compliance with clinical care guidelines from more than 2,600 critically injured trauma and burn patients. The program studied blunt trauma patients (age 16 or older) with shock requiring resuscitation, including blood transfusion, who were followed for up to 28 days from injury during 2003-2009, at seven U.S. academic Level I trauma centers using monitored standard operating procedures (clinical SOPs) developed at study onset. Adults and children with more than 20% total body surface area burns requiring an operation were studied at one of five Level I burn centers. A group of nearly 200 participants were enrolled as healthy controls.
TRDB contents
The Trauma Related Database (TRDB)
The Trauma Related Database (TRBD) brings together the clinical data stored in the production databases as well as the genomic and proteomic data obtained from blood and tissues – as an integrated data warehouse. Using the TRDB, the data-requestor can specify or search for patients of interest, choose a set of data to view, export and save the data in Excel or tab-separated text format, and/or download gene expression data. Other data items that can be downloaded include histology images for tissue-derived data, cell phenotype data, and various computed values.
Clinical, physiologic, pathophysiologic, and outcomes data relevant to the analysis and interpretation of the phenotypic, proteomic, and genomic alterations and interactions in patients with severe trauma- or burn-induced innate immune, and particularly inflammatory processes, were collected in 1,200 distinct data fields, including time course clinical data. Data were collected from 978 patients with blood samples (494 trauma, 484 burns), 1,633 epidemiology patients (no blood samples) (1,515, trauma, 118 burns), and 199 healthy controls.
The TRDB contains more than 5,200 gene expression profiles, monocyte and T-cell functional proteomics panels from 3,800 samples, LC-mass spectroscopy proteomics data from 2,411 blood plasma, isolated neutrophil, monocyte, and T-cells samples, and more than 550 burn tissue histology images.
The data warehoused in TRDB has undergone a vigorous process to insure that the data are useful to other researchers outside of the Glue Grant program. The TRDB data is available to external investigators to meet the NIH requirements of timely and responsible release of data.
Glue Grant investigators are managing the significant bioinformatics resources to provide stewardship over the physical and computational resources developed as part of NIGMS-supported Glue Grant research. The R24 legacy award entitled “Bridging Sustainable Distribution of TRDB Bioinformatics Resources” (NIGMS R24-GM102656) provides a “bridge” toward sustainability of these bioinformatics products as community-wide scientific resources.
Contact
| Wenzhong Xiao, PhD | Peng Li, PhD | Ronald Tompkins, MD, ScD | Grace McDonald-Smith, MEd |
| 617-724-7261 | 617-724-7261 | 617-726-3447 | 617-726-1853 |
Visit the Glue Grant program website