Inside the Race to Solve America's Concussion Crisis
A maverick scientist in Florida, a neurosurgeon in Seattle, and a power couple at Harvard Med School are unlocking new ways to prevent—and even cure—brain injuries.
ESPN THE MAGAZINE / JULY 2019
Jake VanLandingham, Ph.D., a 45-year-old neuroscientist who has spent nearly a decade trying to develop a drug that he believes can heal concussions, works out of his car. Or he sits at the kitchen table of the house he rents in a subdivision in Tallahassee, Florida. “We’re virtual,” he likes to say of his eight-employee company, Prevacus. In 2018, he says, he sold his family home to keep his start-up alive. He’d already raised and spent millions on the toxicology tests, patent applications, attorney fees, and company overhead required to take his drug into Phase 1 human clinical trials, a vital stage on the arduous journey toward FDA approval.
When I visited him in July, he steered us around Tallahassee’s live-oak-lined roads in his Hyundai SUV and explained his drug between phone calls from potential investors. When he spoke, the words emerged in an almost theatrical drawl. Born and raised in the Florida Panhandle, the scion of a clan of vegetable growers with more than a thousand acres under cultivation, VanLandingham is lean and tall, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He was dressed in a polo shirt, jeans, and a pair of flip-flops, the uniform of the Florida dad. (He is the father of four.)
VanLandingham was in good spirits. The last chunk of a promised grant would be coming through at any moment, he said. With that money, he could at last launch Phase 1 safety trials, at a research clinic in Adelaide, Australia. (Many small U. S. biotechs go to Australia for Phase 1 because it’s cheaper there.) If that were to happen, his would be the first new drug specifically targeting concussions ever to be tested in humans...