The Cleveland Clinic will help lead a consortium of institutions in finding new ways to heal soldiers severely wounded in battle, the U.S. Department of Defense announced this afternoon.

The defense department is committing $85 million to create a new Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM).

The Cleveland Clinic, along with Rutgers University, will head a consortium of 15 research centers that includes Case Western Reserve University, University Hospitals Case Medical Center, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic, among others.

A second consortium will be led by the University of Pittsburgh and Wake Forest University.

The two research efforts will each receive $42.5 million in grants. The Clinic will receive a $10 million slice of the grant.

The defense department's goal is to push forward research in the areas of tissue regeneration (using a patient's own cells to grow new bone, muscle, tissue, nerves or blood vessels) and transplantation (using donated limbs to replace those lost in battle or donated facial tissue to replace soldiers' faces severely damaged by fire or explosion).

Research in these areas is already taking place — much of it in Cleveland, said Dr. George Muschler, director of the Clinic's clinical tissue-engineering center and co-director of AFIRM.

The goal of the defense department grants is to push the research to make ''dramatic strides in the next one to five years,'' Muschler said.

''The department of defense was very clear that they were not looking for 'pie in the sky' stuff, not things that might be possible 20 years from now,'' he said. ''There are people who need help now. . . . We need to take the things we can do realistically and focus on those first.''

That would include using a patient's own stem cells to regrow bone, muscle and blood vessels lost in an explosion and using limbs from deceased donors to replace hands, feet, arms or legs lost in war.

''This is already a clinical reality,'' said Dr. Maria Siemionow, the Clinic's head of plastic surgery research. ''Fifty patients worldwide have already had hand transplants. Three patients have had partial face transplants.''

The problem with such transplantations, though, is the risk of rejection by the recipient's immune system. Siemionow's research will focus on novel therapies to quell immune response, without forcing the patient to be on immunosuppresive drugs for a lifetime.