Page 106 - Men’s Health - USA (December 2019)

▶ JAKE VANLANDINGHAM, Ph.D.,
the founder of Prevacus, is developing a nasal
spray to reduce the impact of concussions.
While working in Stein’s lab, Van-
Landingham took the lead in studying
the enantiomer, or mirror image, of
the progesterone molecule. He and his
colleagues found that progesterone’s
enantiomer performed just as well as
its mirror image in returning rats to
cognitive normalcy, and it was better
at neutralizing the free oxygen radicals that appear
after head injuries and can damage brain cells. If
VanLandingham has ever had a eureka moment in
his career, this was probably it. “It was clear-cut data.
It was beautiful, consistent,” he says. “Those are the
most convincing results I ever saw.”
VanLandingham left Emory and took a job as an
assistant professor at the medical school at Flor-
ida State. But the possibilities of the enantiomer
had lodged in his mind. In the late 2000s, with
concussions in the news, he began to wonder: Why
couldn’t this molecule become a drug that treats
people who’ve suff ered a concussion? He founded his
company in 2012, naming it Prevacus, based on the
phrase “prevent a concussion.”
So began years of petri-dish and animal studies. A
consultant he’d hired to advise him on FDA regu-
lations suggested that the drug would be faster and
more eff ective in the brain if it were administered
nasally, like the anti-opioid-overdose spray Narcan.
VanLandingham agreed and worked the nasal spray
into his animal trials. All this testing cost money.
Here and there, he found it. Perhaps no investor was
more important than the wealthy retiree he went to
meet one day in 2014 at the offi ce of the retiree’s agent
in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
“I believe in what he’s doing so much that I’ve
invested almost a million dollars of my own money,”
says Brett Favre over the phone. From that fi rst meet-
ing, he and VanLandingham hit it off . With his own
quarterbacking history, his own brain-injury history,
and his own laconic southern drawl, Favre was
primed to see eye to eye with the person pitching him.
“He was a good salesman,” the Hall of Famer says. For
a time, they both had high hopes that Favre could help
extract some kind of NFL support for Prevacus, pref-
erably fi nancial. “I all but guaranteed him that I could
get the NFL on board,” Favre says ruefully. “Boy, was
I wrong.” Favre approached executives at the highest
levels of the NFL. “But I was politely blown off .” Who
did he talk to? “Roger,” he says, not needing to add
the man’s surname, which is Goodell. Favre has also
approached a few current players—Tom Brady, for
example, who was, according to Favre, intrigued.
At one point, Prevacus appeared to be on the verge
of human trials. VanLandingham had good reason to
believe funding was in place from a Silicon Valley invest- concussion. (He still works Seahawks home games.) He could see fi rsthand
ment fi rm; Prevacus even issued a press release prom-
ising the launch of Phase 1 in the “fi rst half” of 2017.
But 2017 came and went with no clinical trial. In the end,
the Palo Alto fi rm never went through with the deal.
108 December 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH
Since I began talking to VanLandingham more than
a year ago, his target date for the start of Phase 1 trials
has kept slipping into the future. At press time, he told
me they were likely to start by January. Both he and
Favre have been vexed by these delays, and by the trouble
in raising money, especially in light of what they view
as the excessive focus on funneling research funds to
competing technologies. “Stop putting it in helmets!”
Favre exclaims during our phone call. “Most of the money now goes to helmet
companies,” VanLandingham says. “That’s the disgrace of this shit.” Later
he adds, “Vicis is the helmet company that’s getting all the damn money.”
THE HELMET
“About $85 million since inception,” says Dave Marver, the CEO of Vicis,
sitting in his offi ce in Seattle. That’s the amount of money the start-up has
raised in total from the time its founders—the neurosurgeon Sam Browd,
M.D., Ph.D., the mechanical engineer Per Reinhall, Ph.D., and Marver—
got together in 2013 with the idea of designing a helmet that would revo-
lutionize head protection in football. So far, according to Marver, Vicis’s
funding has come chiefl y from individual rich people, including NFL stars
Russell Wilson and Aaron Rodgers, as well as several owners of profes-
sional sports franchises.
One piece of funding in particular was essential to launching Vicis. In
2015, two years before the company brought out its fi rst helmet, it won the
GE, Under Armour, and NFL–sponsored Head Health Challenge, a kind of
open call by the league for TBI preventative and diagnostic advancements,
including helmet technology, part of an overall $60 million investment.
With its victory, Vicis received $1.1 million in NFL grant money, a vital bit
of not just funding but promotion. “It helped us raise investment capital and
get access to NFL locker rooms,” Marver says.
Vicis has spent most of that $85 million on research and development. The
company’s executives are fond of noting that Vicis has more engineers on
staff , 30, “than the rest of the helmet industry combined.” In the open-plan
engineering room, situated in a building in the shadow of the Space Needle,
some engineers today are working on the next-gen Vicis helmet, the Zero2.
Others are working on top-secret things that the VP of marketing, who is
standing next to Marver, is nervous that I might divulge. The company wants
to explore other contact sports and helmeted recreations: hockey, lacrosse,
cycling, soccer. A helmet for soccer? What could that be? A sophisticated
headband? Some kind of water-polo-inspired scalp girdle? The VP looks at
me: “I think we’ve teased that as much as we’re going to tease that.”
“Rough day out there,” says Dr. Browd, who has arrived at Vicis headquar-
ters from the operating theater at Seattle Children’s Hospital. It turns out
he’s not talking about the successful brain surgery he just performed on a
fi ve-year-old child but about the traffi c. Dr. Browd is a pediatric neurosur-
geon, and over the years, local high school football stars have presented
at his offi ce with their third or fourth or fi fth concussions. Frequently, his
clinical opinion was that those players should never play football again.
“You start to have that conversation and everyone in the room is crying,” he
says. “It was a conversation I didn’t want to continue to have.”
In 2013, Dr. Browd became one of the NFL’s new independent neurosur-
geons, who stand on the sidelines during games and evaluate players for
the velocity of the impacts, the damage being done, and, he says, helmet
technology that was “really antiquated.” That same year, Dr. Browd drew
some ideas literally on a napkin. He then went to Reinhall, head of the Uni-
versity of Washington’s Boeing Advanced Research Center. Two weeks later,