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Soldiers in combat, boxers and children on the football field all run the risk of concussions that can affect them long after the injury. But diagnosing traumatic brain injuries still involves expensive and cumbersome machinery and the research is trying to catch up to the problem.
A partnership between Banyan Biomarkers and Quanterix may help change that by studying the chemistry — in particular two proteins — unleashed when humans take a blow to their head. Researchers don’t know much about them but they do know that when someone has hit their head hard enough to damage the brain, these markers soon show up.
The two companies partnered with each other in order to give researchers tools to understand just what role the proteins play in the destruction of the brain brought on by a traumatic head injury.
They want to up the ante on the diagnosis and treatment of traumatic brain injuries, which costs the U.S. health system alone $76.5 billion. Traumatic brain injury could affect 10 million people around the world each year by the end of this decade — from children to the elderly.
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Just understanding that the presence of the two proteins is a sign of traumatic brain injury is new. The impact triggers their release and they cross over into the bloodstream, something the field didn’t think could happen.
“People thought what goes on in the brain stays in the brain,” said Henry Nordhoff, chairman and chief executive of Banyan Biomarkers, the San Diego company on the diagnostics side of the partnership.
That is, until researchers at the Florida McKnight Brain Institute saw that they could, and indeed did, escape through the brain-blood barrier and are detectable in the blood.
The new knowledge led to a test licensed by Banyan, which uses a drop of blood to check for the proteins.
“There’s never been a blood test for the brain,” Nordhoff said.
On the disease detection side of the partnership is Quanterix, the Lexington, Massachusetts company, whose high-definition molecule measurement instrument, Simoa, can identify the biological markers associated with brain injuries.
The technology is being used in several neurology-focused evaluation studies, including professional ice hockey players in Sweden, Olympic boxers, Army combat soldiers and NFL football players.
Some of the money supporting the endeavor comes from the Department of Defense, some from a partnership between General Electric and the NFL, both of which have good reason for being interested in better diagnosis and treatment. Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw revealed he struggles with short-term memory loss, depression and anxiety, effects he attributes to the numerous concussions suffered during his career.
But a lack of objective biomarkers for brain damage hampers diagnosis and clinical decision-making regarding when it is safe for athletes to return to play after a concussion, according to a study of ice-hockey players. The lack of an objective diagnosis helps explain how NFL quarterback Peyton Manning could rig concussion tests meant to protect the players.
Head injuries so plagued military serving in Afghanistan and Iraq that the Department of Defense opened a research division, the Defense Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury.
However, not only athletes and the military are affected. Every day, 138 people in the country die from injuries that include traumatic brain injuries, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Survivors can face effects lasting a few days to disabilities which may last the rest of their lives.
It could be a child on the playground who falls off the monkey bars or a 70-year- old who arrives at an emergency room after a fall. But not every emergency department has an MRI or can do a CT scan, not to mention that many CT scans are negative for traumatic brain injury even though patients continue to suffer from brain injury symptoms, according to Banyan.
However, Nordhoff also said that the time from research to an approved treatment is a long and arduous process especially in a field as uncharted as brain injuries.
“There’s a lot we don’t understand,” he said.