FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Richard M. Greenwald
SIMBEX AWARDED MULTI-YEAR, MULTI-INSTITUTION RESEARCH GRANT BY NIH ON MILD TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY IN COLLEGIATE SPORTS
Lebanon, NH - September 4, 2007 - The National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health has awarded Lebanon, NH based research and development company Simbex a five year, $3.6M Bioengineering Research Partnership award entitled “Biomechanical Basis of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI)." Simbex will partner with Dartmouth Medical School Departments of Psychiatry and of Pediatric Neurosurgery, Dartmouth Athletics, Rhode Island Hospital Department of Orthopaedics, Brown University Dept of Athletics, Virginia Tech Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Athletics, and Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine on this research project. The ultimate goal of this NIH research is to improve the understanding of mild traumatic brain injury for the purpose of developing new techniques for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. The project will study athletes on the men’s football teams and men’s and women’s hockey teams. The athletes will wear helmets instrumented with Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) System technology developed by Simbex in part with NIH funding through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program since 2000. This technology has been in use on football fields across the country since 2004, with more than 350,000 head impacts collected and analyzed from more than 500 college and high school athletes. Each of the research locations will collect head impact data during practices and games of the football and hockey teams over the next five years. They will be measuring and recording the number of head impacts, the time of the impact, the location and duration of the impact. These biomechanical impact data will be collected and correlated to injury experiences and clinical follow up until the athletes return to play using common methodologies across the different research sites. All of the data will be pooled and submitted to Simbex for analysis by the research team. Simbex utilizes its patented multi-variable data analysis algorithms to determine which types of impacts and what frequency of impacts lead to head injuries. "This NIH-funded research opportunity will allow us to vastly improve our knowledge of concussion injury. Simbex is honored to expand its work and to partner with such incredibly diverse and qualified research and clinical teams both locally and nationally to tackle the problem of correlating the clinical understanding of brain function surrounding mild TBI with the incidence, severity, location and individual impacts to the head", said Richard Greenwald, PhD, Principal Investigator of the study, President of Simbex, and adjunct associate professor of engineering at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College Each of the participating institutions will also extend the research in specific topic areas. Dartmouth will utilize novel functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) imaging and analysis techniques supervised by Dartmouth Medical School professor and co-investigator Tom McAllister, MD, to analyze changes in working memory function in the brain of concussed athletes and in athletes who have sustained multiple sub-concussive impacts. "It is critically important to understand the role of concussive as well as repetitive non-concussive impacts on brain function in these athletes – we hope to apply the information learned here to other populations beyond the collegiate athlete, and especially for children and youth", said Dr. McAllister. Joseph J. Crisco III, PhD, co-inventor of the HIT System technology along with Greenwald, will lead the advancement of the technology and analysis tools at Rhode Island Hospital Department of Orthopaedics and Brown University. "The ability to capture large amounts of field data on head impacts and to correlate those impacts with actual diagnosed concussions and the clinical data associated with those injuries is unprecedented, and will certainly lead to new findings and opportunities for preventing and treating sports-related brain injury", said Crisco. Stefan Duma, PhD, Professor at Virginia Tech Department of Biomedical Engineering, and P. Gunnar Brolinson, DO, Virginia College of Osteopathic and Team Physician for Virginia Tech are testing next-generation versions of HIT System technology that directly measure of the rotational motion of the head following impacts in sports as well as novel sideline assessment techniques for evaluating players' balance following head impacts.
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