Professor Martin Yarmush, Rene Schloss, and David Shreiber have been awarded a 3-year, $540,000 grant from the New Jersey Commission on Brain Injury Research for a project entitled, “Mesenchymal Stem Cells as Traumatic Brain Injury Therapeutics”. The overall goal of the project is to evaluate the therapeutic potential of encapsulated MSCs in organotypic slice cultures of hippocampus and cortex which have been subjected to traumatic injury, and then to utilize the information gained in vitro to evaluate effects in a cortical contusion animal model.