Navy funds Brown project to learn more about how to spot and prevent head injuries
Brown University
A research collaboration including
three Brown University professors has been working toward a comprehensive
understanding of traumatic brain injury — linking the damage occurring at the
cellular level in the brain with the forces and motions involved in blows to
the head. The collaboration, called PANTHER, ultimately aims to develop new
ways of detecting when a concussion has occurred, and new helmet technologies
that better protect against them.
Now, that work is set to expand
thanks to a new $10 million grant from the Office of Naval Research within the
U.S. Department of the Navy.
“Concussions are insidious injuries because there are often no outward signs that an injury has happened,” said Haneesh Kesari, an assistant professor in Brown’s School of Engineering who works on the project with fellow faculty members Diane Hoffman-Kim and David Henann. “So there’s a need to find new detection methods, and that requires a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying these injuries. That’s what we’re trying to do.”
PANTHER is led by Christian Franck,
a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who launched the project at
Brown in 2017, when he was a professor in the School of Engineering. Franck is
developing new techniques for imaging damage to
individual cells following trauma, and is working to precisely
quantify the forces required to cause that damage.
Hoffman-Kim, an associate professor
of medical science and engineering, is working to take Franck’s single-cell
research to the level of cell clusters. She works with mini-brains, 3D cultures
of brain cells that mimic the basic functions of actual brains. Using
mini-brains, the researchers are hoping to learn more about the chemical
signals exchanged between cells in response to trauma. Those signaling pathways
could potentially serve as a means of concussion detection.
“Mini-brains are really just balls of cells, but they have electrical activity, capillary networks and they reliably approximate the cell density and the stiffness of the brain, which is all relevant to what we’re studying,” said Hoffman-Kim, who is affiliated with Brown's Carney Institute for Brain Science.
“With the PANTHER collaboration, we
will be able to use mini-brains to do real-time injury detection and get a
handle on the biochemical signals that occur as an injury progresses.”
Kesari and Henann will work on
computational methods that link those internal cellular injuries to external
stresses and strains. The goal is to create high-fidelity computer models of
the head, neck and brain that can capture injury dynamics both inside the brain
and out.
“Diane’s and Christian’s work tells
us the amount of stress or strain inside the brain that leads to injury,”
Kesari said. “Then the question becomes: If a football player is running down
the field and takes a hit, how does that external force translate into internal
strain? So my work is to connect those physical motions with strains inside the
brain.”
Eventually, the team would like to
develop sensors that can be placed inside helmets that can detect impacts
delivered with sufficient force to cause internal damage.
“You can think of it like a Fitbit
for the head,” Kesari said. “The idea is that you’re monitoring all the time,
so when a damaging impact happens you can intervene immediately.”
The team is also working with an
industry partner, helmet-maker Team Wendy, to translate new information about
the concussion process into new helmets that are better at preventing brain
injury.
Hoffman-Kim says she’s happy to be
part of an effort that has the potential to help so many people.
“I’m the mom of two boys who played
sports all through high school,” she said. “I think a lot of us have heard,
‘No, mom, it’s fine; I can go back on the field.’ But we know that repeated
traumatic brain injuries can cause long-term problems. If we can make progress
in detecting the initial injury, hopefully we can prevent some of those longer-term
problems.”