A new collaboration between regenerative medicine experts and the military is setting the stage to launch several clinical trials of treatments for combat wounds, including one experiment to regrow an injured soldier's missing ear.

The Soldier Treatment and Regeneration Consortium will focus on research that could lead to novel treatments for burns and wounds and perhaps even regenerate digits and limbs.

During a visit to the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative yesterday, U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., announced "a $1 million congressional earmark that gets this program up and running."

"We're bringing in other university centers, other branches within the military to be able to come together and take the research that is being done here and turn it into practical applications," he said.

Along with PTEI, the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the U.S Army Institute of Surgical Research in Fort Sam Houston, Texas, Walter Reed Army Medical Center and others are part of the consortium.

More than 16,000 soldiers have been injured in the Iraq war, according to statistics from the Department of Defense. About 6 percent of the wounded have needed amputations.

The funding will be used to coordinate activities and prepare for safety trials of possibly five new therapies within the year, said Alan Russell, executive director of PTEI and director of the McGowan Institute.

"We'll seek to grow digits for soldiers who have lost fingers and toes, seek to close wounds by reconstituting skin and muscle, and use tissue engineering to regenerate tissue after massive tissue loss," he explained. Also, "the clinical trials will treat burns with two novel therapies."

Researchers will test a powder form of a material that "no matter where you put it on the body, it induces natural regenerative capacity" to try to heal, Dr. Russell said. It might prompt tissue, such as an amputated fingertip, to regrow.

"We don't really understand yet exactly how it's happening" in biological terms, he said, so the material must be studied further.

One of the first soldier-patients could get a new ear, which he lost in an explosion. His own cells would be used to seed the growth of a replacement in the lab, and then the still-developing tissue would be implanted under a flap of skin, Dr. Russell said.

"I should point out these are clinical trials, not clinical realities," he cautioned. "We don't know how many of these things will actually work. The point is to begin the process of finding out."

The studies will be conducted at Fort Sam Houston, which Dr. Russell called one of the Army's main trauma centers.