Page 104 - Men’s Health - USA (December 2019)

J
JAKE VANLANDINGHAM, Ph.D., a 45-year-old
neuroscientist who has spent nearly a decade
trying to develop a drug that he believes can heal
concussions, works out of his car. Or he sits at
the kitchen table of the house he rents in a sub-
division in Tallahassee, Florida. “We’re virtual,”
he likes to say of his eight-employee company,
Prevacus. In 2018, he says, he sold his family
home to keep his start-up alive. He’d already
raised and spent millions on the toxicology tests,
patent applications, attorney fees, and company
overhead required to take his drug into Phase 1
human clinical trials, a vital stage on the arduous
journey toward FDA approval.
When I visited him in July, he steered us around
Tallahassee’s live-oak-lined roads in his Hyundai SUV
and explained his drug between phone calls from po-
tential investors. When he spoke, the words emerged
in an almost theatrical drawl. Born and raised in the
Florida Panhandle, the scion of a clan of vegetable
growers with more than a thousand acres under
cultivation, VanLandingham is lean and tall, with
close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He was dressed in
a polo shirt, jeans, and a pair of flip-flops, the uniform
of the Florida dad. (He is the father of four.)
VanLandingham was in good spirits. The last
chunk of a promised grant would be coming through
at any moment, he said. With that money, he could at
last launch Phase 1 safety trials, at a research clinic
in Adelaide, Australia. (Many small U.S. biotechs go
to Australia for Phase 1 because it’s cheaper there.) If
that were to happen, his would be the first new drug
specifically targeting concussions ever to be tested
in humans.
Raising funds has been difficult, he said, partly
because of the confounding nature of concussion
itself. Every person experiences concussion differ-
ently. Between 10 and 15 percent of people who suffer
just a single concussion will go on to have cognitive
problems for more than a year. No one knows why.
Called post-concussion syndrome, or PCS, it can
involve trouble with concentration, attention,
106 December 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH
memory, and judgment. Headache, dizziness,
lack of balance, blurry vision. Sleep abnor-
malities, anxiety, panic attacks, depression.
Children are more vulnerable to concussions
than adults, and it takes longer for them to
recover. As many as 1.9 million children suffer
sports-related concussions in the U.S. each
year, according to the American Academy of
Pediatrics—up to 285,000 of them could have
symptoms that last longer than 12 months.
About 2.8 million people overall are diagnosed
with a concussion annually, a few of them fa-
mously—in the NFL, the NHL, or even MLS—
most anonymously. A fraction of those will
experience concussion symptoms for the rest
of their lives. Out there is the grandfather who,
after a fall, has permanent vertigo. Out there is
the otherwise healthy 30-year-old whose life,
from the moment of a single concussion, is now
punctuated by debilitating migraines. Out
there is the teenager who, after a head injury,
can’t get the words to unscramble on the page.
Yet the only accepted medical treatment for
concussions today remains rest and time—the
same as it’s always been, and the same thing you
might do for a hangover. Now there’s a boom
in brain-injury research. It encompasses not
just basic science and drug development but
diagnostics, sporting equipment, and non-
pharmacological therapies. At least six orga-
nizations—start-ups and university research
programs—are now striving to develop concussion drugs. There are efforts to
devise an FDA-approved method for diagnosing concussion, including new
blood tests, advanced brain scans, and systems that use artificial intelligence
to read them. There are newfangled sports helmets. Futuristic materials.
Collars that look like chokers and that constrict the jugular to reduce“brain
slosh” (a technical term). Hyperbaric oxygen chambers. Visual-oculomotor
therapy. The postgame spliff. Out of this field, one group, VanLandingham’s,
is trying to create a treatment that eases symptoms and speeds recovery.
Another, a start-up helmet maker, is attempting to blunt the head collisions
of contact sports, thus possibly saving those sports from a calamitous drop
in participation. And a third, in Boston, is testing what it believes could be a
cure for the long-term neurological degeneration associated with repeated
blows to the head. All address a potential multibillion-dollar market.
Mysteries abide, and VanLandingham has dedicated his life to solving
them. “The major thought throughout the history of clinical medicine for
concussion has been: There’s nothing to do for it, go lie down, and hopefully
you’ll be in the 85 percent of people who get better in a couple of weeks and
move on with your life,” he says. “Whereas I’ve always said, Look, if there were
a hundred people that fell off a damn ladder today, and 15 of the hundred broke
their arm, we’d treat their broken arm! Why the hell aren’t we treating their
broken brain? It doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense to me—excuse my language.”
THE SPRAY
The short history of modern concussion theory starts in the 1980s, when
a neurologist named John Povlishock, Ph.D., at the Virginia Common-
wealth University School of Medicine, gave traumatic brain injuries, or