US Department of Defense
BLAST INJURY RESEARCH
COORDINATING OFFICE
Advancing Blast Injury Research to Protect and Heal Those Who Serve
The DOD Blast Injury Research Coordinating Office (BIRCO) supports the DOD Executive Agent by coordinating blast injury research inside and outside of the DOD, nationally and internationally, to support the delivery of timely and effective blast injury prevention, mitigation, and treatment solutions for Service members. BIRCO's activities help to identify and address blast injury knowledge gaps, shape medical research programs to fill identified gaps, facilitate collaboration among diverse communities, disseminate information, and minimize duplication of effort. BIRCO's initiatives are chosen to create and support collaboration among researchers across the DOD, other federal agencies, academia, industry, and international partners to solve complex challenges related to blast injury.
The Military Health System (MHS) Blast Injury Prevention Standards Recommendation (BIPSR) Process is the DoD's first unbiased, inclusive, stakeholder-driven process designed to identify and assess the suitability and applicability of existing candidate standards and to recommend standards that meet DoD Stakeholder needs with a suitable level of validity, rigor, precision, and confidence. The BIPSR Process seeks to ensure that the DoD uses the best available, scientifically sound, and biomedically-valid standards that will protect our Service Members from blast injuries.
The annual International State-of-the-Science (SoS) Meeting Series is a unique forum that leverages the expertise of scientists, engineers, and clinicians within specific blast injury topics to identify knowledge gaps and formulate recommendations to inform future blast injury research priorities and facilitate the development of blast injury prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation strategies for the Service Member.
BIRCO prepares an annual report to the DOD EA for Medical Research for Prevention, Mitigation, and Treatment of Blast Injuries, which describes accomplishments from across the network of DOD organizations and partners who are engaged in medical and nonmedical blast-related research.
In support of the Executive Agent responsibility to promote collaboration on blast injury research topics, the Blast Injury Research Coordinating Office actively engages international stakeholder communities. Specific initiatives include collaborations with Japan, Israel, and India as well as the office's active participation in several North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Human Factors and Medicine (HFM) Research Task Groups (RTGs).
The Blast Injury Research Coordinating Office participates in various local, national, and international research collaboration meetings, supporting the EA responsibilities to promote information sharing, disseminate blast injury research information, and facilitate collaboration across the DoD, academia, and industry. The events calendar lists past and future research collaboration meetings attended by this office or plans to attend.
BIRCO is a member of the DOD team responding to a Congressional mandate for a Longitudinal Medical Study on Blast Pressure Exposure of Members of the Armed Forces through the National Defense Authorization Act Blast Overpressure Studies (NDAA BOS) initiative. The NDAA BOS will improve the DOD's understanding of the impact of blast pressure exposure on Service member's brain health and inform policy for risk mitigation, unit readiness, and health care decisions.
The objective of the DoD Working Group on Computational Modeling of Human Lethality, Injury, and Impairment from Blast-related Threats is to encourage collaboration and facilitate cooperative RDT&E programs across the DoD related to human injury models of Service members. With stakeholder organizations from across the DoD and other government agencies, this Working Group will help to coalesce fragmented and disparate human modeling and simulation programs and projects to create a coordinated and cohesive DoD effort that will enable a new capability for modeling and simulation across the entire spectrum of blast threat environments.
This initiative seeks to preserve and disseminate DoD historical blast bioeffects research data collected over 40 years at the Albuquerque Blast Test Site on Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. The goal of this effort is to provide broad access to the considerable wealth of DoD historical data and findings on the biological effects of blast from past studies so that program managers, researchers, and medical decision makers can solve current and future problems with a minimum of duplication and a maximum of efficiency.
The DOD Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Programs harness the innovative talents and entrepreneurial energies of our nation's small technology companies for US military and economic strength. BIRCO participates by developing candidate topics for Phase I solicitations in the US Army or Defense Health Agency (DHA) SBIR/STTR Programs. Successful proposals funded for these topics are managed by BIRCO.
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