Crystal Hill-Pryor, A. Pusateri, R. Weiskopf
Oct 1, 2019
Citations
0
Influential Citations
3
Citations
Journal
Shock
Abstract
The US Army Combat Casualty Care Research Program of The US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command hosted the, ‘‘The Oxygen Carrier State of the Science Meeting,’’ on February 6 to 8, 2017 at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The purpose of the meeting was to understand the current status of the science and clinical trials of oxygen carrier research. The Department of Defense (DoD) along with other US Federal Governmental agencies—The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, and The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—brought together experts in the field of hemorrhage and resuscitation, trauma specialists, DoD scientific and programmatic experts, and regulatory officials. These subject matter experts presented and discussed topics that would be necessary to advance the field of oxygen carriers as it relates to military medicine, specifically the unmet needs of combat casualty care, as well as the potential applications in emergency preparedness and civilian trauma. The military need presented by Cap (1) is abundantly clear, with the preponderance of battlefield deaths being associated with hemorrhage (2), requiring both hemostasis and oxygen transport augmentation for their survival. These requirements are expected to be accentuated in future military environments of prolonged field care and delayed evacuation. However, it was also recognized that there is an analogous unmet need in the civilian community, most prominently for the circumstances of trauma in remote or rural locations, as presented by Jenkins (3), and potentially for mass casualties, as presented by Hrdina, who noted when discussing a nuclear detonation that large numbers of casualties could benefit from intervention with oxygen transporters (4). The articles in this supplement issue of SHOCK reflect some, but not all, of the presentations related to hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs) at that meeting. Other presentations could not be included owing to space and fiscal constraints, conflicts with data either as yet unpublished or in press elsewhere, and other issues. A comprehensive summary report from the meeting is available (5). In this brief introduction we attempt to highlight the main thrust of the sessions related to HBOCs,