Page 107 - Men’s Health - USA (December 2019)

Dr. Lu told me, “If a
player gets a big hit
or many small hits,
I would give him a
dose of the antibody.
If it’s caught early,
then maybe their
sport will not be
afraid anymore.”
Marver met with Dr. Browd and became involved. Far
more than his jottings, what Dr. Browd brought to the
table was an understanding of the forces that cause
concussion. “I said: ‘Look, the medical literature is
showing that we think concussions are more likely
to come from rotational forces than direct linear
impact,’ ” Dr. Browd recalls. “ ‘If we just started
from zero, how would you better mitigate that type of
force?’ ” Out of these insights came Vicis’s core inno-
vation: a “columnar structure,” a kind of latticework,
under an outer shell that deforms upon impact, an
idea taken from automotive safety, à la car crumple
zones. The columnar structure, too, is designed to
absorb and then dissipate the rotational and linear
forces of hits in football. Brainstorming this stuff ,
they felt as though they were injecting some STEM
into a stagnant industry. Vicis is Latin for “change.”
Inside a converted garage at Vicis headquarters,
the company has created what it calls its “Smash
Lab.” The principal pieces of equipment here are
machines that bash helmets with pneumatic rams.
Resting serenely in front of a pneumatic ram is a
crash-test dummy’s head wearing a
Vicis helmet. The head is attached to
an articulating neck, and the helmet
is coated with sensors. An engineer
Karl L. Moore/courtesy Vicis (helmet) Boom! The head snaps—whiplashed.
counts down. “Three, two, one . . .”
The word I write in my notebook is
“cannon.” A live person standing
there with a naked head would, it
seems clear, have been killed by that
thing. The speed setting for this
particular shot, according to the engineer op-
erating it, is 7.4 meters per second—about 16.6
miles per hour. It’s below 9.3 meters per second,
which the NFL has determined is the average
closing speed of two NFL players in a “concus-
sive or signifi cant” head-to-head impact.
Vicis’s helmet reduces head-impact severity
signifi cantly enough to have ranked it number
one among all helmets tested by the NFL since
it came to market in 2017. But the league only
began releasing player-concussion data in
2012, so the sample sizes are too small for any
kind of conclusion about concussion reduction.
In the lower echelons of the sport—high school,
college—there has been little research, and
thus limited data, and therefore no evidence
on which any helmet maker could base a claim
that its headgear reduces the incidence of con-
cussion. And Vicis is very careful about this.
They want you to be clear: The company cannot
say that its helmets prevent concussions. Its
pitch is that its helmet does a better job of “mit-
igating impact forces.” “Those are hard studies
to do,” says Dr. Browd. To do one would require
a long-term randomized trial with diff erent
helmets, controlled for myriad player-specifi c
variables. It could cost $40 million, he estimates, and “probably needs to
happen at the level of the NIH.”
Helmet skeptics aren’t buying it. “To me, the millions the NFL put into hel-
mets is primarily a PR maneuver to make people believe the problem could be
solved by helmets,” says Chris Nowinski, Ph.D., a cofounder of the Concus-
sion Legacy Foundation and a former Harvard defensive lineman. “Solving
the concussion problem doesn’t necessarily solve the CTE problem.”
THE ANTIBODY
Kun Ping Lu, M.D., Ph.D., grew up on a rice farm amid the green terraced
paddies of rural Fujian Province, in southeast China. Disciplined, focused,
he eventually left the countryside for the city, where he earned a medical de-
gree and a master’s degree in pharmacology. After publishing studies on the
mechanics of human cell biology, he was recruited to join the Ph.D. biology
program at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He went there with his
young bride, Xiao Zhen Zhou, M.D., who was starting a research position at
the University of Texas. She had also grown up on a rice farm and had also
earned a medical degree. The year was 1989, the year of Tiananmen Square.
Within a decade they had landed on the faculty of Harvard Medical School.
Soon enough, the couple’s research interests converged, fi rst on cancer
and then on the brain. In the 1990s, Dr. Lu helped discover
a new kind of enzyme, dubbed Pin1, that plays a crucial
role in cell division. Through years of lab studies, they
learned that an important function of the Pin1 enzyme
Among them is a protein called tau, and tau’s function, in
is to keep a certain set of proteins in their correct shape.
turn, is to build and maintain the brain’s axons, the long
◀HEAD BANGER The Vicis Zero1 is the top-rated NFL
helmet. It beat out 33 other brands tested for the ability
to reduce head-impact severity in a lab.
MEN’S HEALTH / December 2019 109