Traumatic Brain Injury

IConcussion, a term commonly used to describe a mild or moderate traumatic brain injury (TBI) to the brain, is a public health crises with origins on the battlefield, athletic venues, and automobiles with three point safety belts. While concussions and brain injury are commonly considered to be the catalytic events in neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia, Alzheimers, and Parkinson’s, there are no dedicated medicinal therapeutics for treatment of concussion and little interest on the part of the pharma and biotech industries to engage in this area of research. This problem can be attributed to two issues: 1) a historical hypothesis that brain injury was due to neuronal cell death (so nothing left to treat with a drug) and 2) a lack of technologies for pharma and biotech to use to study and identify the cellular processes in concussion that could be targeted by drugs.