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Protecting minds and bodies
By Molly Parker
Staff Writer
Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina will attempt to make crash-test dummies a whole lot smarter.
Through a partnership with Ladson-based Force Protection Inc., MUSC plans to create a faux brain that can be used to study the impact of massive jolts to the cerebrum.
Force Protection will use the crash-test dummy heads to determine how best to protect the brain through new equipment or alterations to their blast-protected war vehicles. The company simulates battlefield explosions at its test site in rural Edgefield. The damaged heads that had been inside Force Protection’s vehicles will be sent back to MUSC.
“The good news is their vehicles save lives,” said Dr. Mark George, who will lead the newly opened Force Protection Center for Brain Research at MUSC. “The bad news is soldiers come home and their brains are scrambled. Force Protection wants to move toward the next level and create trucks that not only save lives but also prevent brain injury.”
Earlier this month, Force Protection and MUSC announced the opening of the center dedicated to traumatic brain injury, known as TBI, which doctors think might cause or exacerbate post-traumatic stress disorder.
Extreme close-ups
The pinnacle of the center is a Siemens 3-Tesla MRI scanner, known for its ability to produce extremely detailed images. Force Protection donated the $1.5 million cost of the machine, which Siemens provided to MUSC at a discounted rate. Under their agreement, it must be used explicitly for research.
“It’s one of the best machines in the world,” George said.
A neurologist and psychiatrist at MUSC, George has focused on brain imaging for most of his career. The problem with older scanners is that they cannot detect fine frays in the cablings that connect the billions of neurons that make up the brain, he said.
The center will study whether disturbances in a brain’s wiring can cause behavioral deficit, headaches, tremors, concentration issues or a host of other symptoms including post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The problem with this type of brain injury is that it’s not easily detectable. People ask, ‘Are they faking it?’ And that sets up this terrible dialogue. The reason it goes undetected is that traumatic brain injury is a fraying of the cable and that is below the resolution of most scanners.”
Figuring out how to simulate those cables is the tough part. It could be done using a common vegetable such as celery, or it might require bioengineering cells, George said.
“This is very much in the discovery phase,” he said. “It’s like building the first bell, and you’ll have a hundred bells that don’t work per week.”
A leap of faith
George applauded Force Protection for allowing MUSC free access to the technology should the researchers find a successful formula for a crash-test brain. At first, MUSC will make the test heads by hand, but if demand is high enough, George said he could foresee seeking out a company to mass-produce them.
“The Detroit-manufactured test dummies are just primitive,” he said. “They’ll tell you whether a bone is broken, but that’s about it. They have a head, but they don’t have a brain. It’s just a solid skull. You can use them to predict how fast the head moved in an accident, but you can’t look at what it did to the inside of the brain.”
George said it’s unclear where the partnership with Force Protection will lead in the long run.
“It’s kind of a leap of faith,” he said. “It’s a partnership with the full extent of things undefined.”
Including the initial $1.5 million contribution, the company pledged $5 million to the center over the course of several years, Force Protection spokesman Tommy Pruitt said.
How it came to be
Vanessa Hill is a development director with MUSC’s Department of Psychiatry. Her office sits right behind the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center, where she met several young men and women receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. She said their stories touched her heart.
“I said, ‘You know, there has got to be a way to figure this out,’ ” she said.
“We have soldiers coming back who look fine physically, and because they are not impaired or haven’t lost a limb, it might seem like they are OK. Certainly not all of them, but it seems more are coming back facing traumatic brain injury.”
On a Saturday more than a year ago, Hill e-mailed a Force Protection executive to see whether the company might want to create a partnership with MUSC to develop technology to protect not only the body, but also the brain.
“I knew that if he answered me over the weekend, he was the guy, that he was dedicated to his job,” Hill said. She checked her e-mail every hour. By midafternoon Sunday, she had an answer from Damon Walsh, the company’s executive vice president of customer operations and a retired Army officer.
“He was just the guy to help move this through,” Hill said. “He believed in it.”
In a statement, Michael Moody, Force Protection’s chief executive, called the partnership “an important extension of our company’s mission.”
“The work of this center will have a real and lasting impact on those who sacrifice so much to preserve our freedoms,” he said. “We are bringing the great people, resources and skills of MUSC and Force Protection together. We aim to innovate and develop additional survivability solutions that will provide our men and women in uniform with the best possible protection.”
In a recent call with investors, Moody said the company is committing more resources to research and development in an effort to expand its portfolio and contribute to solutions that save the lives of soldiers and Marines at war.
Molly Parker is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at mparker@scbiznews.com.
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