The return of the NFL is upon us, though the Patriots aren’t the only Massachusetts name making headlines in football. Though the return of the defending Super Bowl champions (as well as the off-the-field drama regarding Tom Brady) more than monopolizes local coverage, it’s worth noting that a local startup has a football victory of its own to celebrate.
Quanterix, a Lexington-based company that’s on the forefront of developing the detection and quantification of biomarkers in the bloodstream, recently won another grant of $500,000 from the NFL and General Electric. The Head Health Challenge, put on by both GE and the NFL, has already proven to be a fruitful endeavor for Quanterix. The biotech company triumphed over a staggering level of more than 400 competitors in the first phase of the challenge and have now added to its total grant sum.
“General Electric and the NFL teamed up about a year and a half ago, and basically because of all the bad news around concussions in the league, they wanted to do a couple of things,” explained Quanterix CEO Kevin Hrusovsky in a recent interview. “Number one was; is there a way to detect it earlier? And then is there a way to treat it?”
Quanterix could play a defining role in the future of early detection of concussions. Using the company’s exclusive patent on a technology called Singular Molecule Array (Simoa), it’s developing ways to identify and accurately diagnose traumatic brain injuries more quickly than ever before. The ramifications are clearly enormous for football and the NFL, given that sideline concussion tests are fundamentally flawed in their current form.
If Quanterix is able to perfect its biomarker technology, it would shift the current procedure of sideline concussion tests from an inexact cognizant test model (where a trainer merely asks a player various questions to check if they have signs of a concussion).
The company’s model is able to be much more accurate. Hrusovsky elaborated:
This is one small example I recently heard: You know how small a sugar cube is. If you break it into 32 pieces, we could find that in an Olympic size swimming pool. That’s kind of like what our technology can do. It can see things that are very, very small in blood. And so there are some biomarkers, or proteins that nobody even know were in blood.
Why does that matter for football concussions? It all comes down to the human body’s reaction to head trauma.
“What happens is that when someone has a concussion, it releases these biomarkers into blood that our technology can see,” said Hrusovsky. In other words, the company has a unique lens into previously untraceable indicators of a concussion.
“We’re bringing the real science to bear here,” Hrusovsky asserted.
Though Hrusovsky was quick to point out that this is still a few years away, he envisions a time when sideline trainers will have handheld devices that utilize Quanterix’s technology. It would revolutionize the quick diagnosis of concussions, helping NFL teams to make speedy and safe judgements regarding the health of the players.
“GE got very excited and so did the NFL,” Hrusovsky noted. “So we’re now talking to them about the possibility of doing something even on the sidelines, where you would have a little handheld device that you would prick the player’s finger and it would be able to tell you whether they had a concussion.”
For the moment, Quanterix is focusing on just getting its testing ability into practice with the NFL. Before handheld devices are perfected, central sites will be used to rapidly test players’ blood samples.
“I think that you’ll start to see, I would say around the 2016 time, a test being administered,” Hrusovsky explained. “Samples will be collected and taken to a centralized location.”
Quanterix has been the discussion of an IPO already in 2015. In a report from the Boston Business Journal (prior to winning a second grant from GE and the NFL), interest appeared to be creeping up as the company had already exceeded its total 2014 revenue in half of 2015.
Hrusovsky openly acknowledged that that company is heading in the direction of an eventual public offering.
“We’re looking to potentially do an IPO early next year,” he noted, explaining that there’s a lot of interest in Quanterix given the possibilites of the technology that they have exclusively. Going beyond football, it has potential benefits in identifying those at risk of heart attack, as well possibly Alzheimer’s Disease.
The background of the company revolves around a scientific discovery made locally.
“It’s hard to believe, but this was invented at Tufts University,” Hrusovsky said of the biomarker Simoa technology. “His name is Dr. David Walt. And it was in his laboratories that he discovered a way to see proteins and biomarkers in blood.”
“It’s actually a great hometown story that it went from the laboratory of Tufts into becoming this company where we have an exclusive license for that technology,” Hrusovsky added. “And we’ve been building it out.”
Image via Quanterix
