As more and more soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan return home suffering from serious battlefield injuries, a group of universities and medical centers will receive $85 million from the U.S. Army to find ways to restore limbs, replace ears and noses and heal burns of severely wounded soldiers.

Since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in late 2002, more than 30,000 service members have been wounded.

Therefore, the Pentagon launched the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine made up of two teams – the first led by Wake Forest University in North Carolina and the University of Pittsburgh and the second led by Rutgers University in New Jersey and the Cleveland Clinic.

The research will focus on regenerative medicine, a relatively new field that relies on man-made materials and biologically grown materials to help the body repair, replace and restore damaged tissues and organs.

The two teams will “work to develop techniques that will help to make our soldiers whole again. We’ll use the soldiers’ own stem cells to repair nerve damage, to re-grow muscles and tendons, to repair burn wounds and to help them heal without scarring,” Lieutenant General Eric Schoomaker, the Army’s surgeon general said Thursday at a Defense Department press conference, according to The Star-Ledger.

The money will be split between the two academic-led groups. Additionally matching funds from academic institutions, industry and state and federal agencies will boost the total above $250 million.

Some of the nation’s top research institutions have enrolled in the project, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

“We’ve had just over 900 people, men, some women with amputations of some kind or another since the start of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Getting these people up to where they are functioning and reintegrated, employed, able to help their families and be fully participating members of society, this is our task,” Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs said quoted by Reuters.

The therapies developed in the years to come to help soldiers could also be used to help civilian trauma victims.