A Massachusetts Company Won an NFL-Backed Grant Challenge

http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2015/08/10/quanterix-nfl-concussion-model-simao-system-helps-identify-head-trauma-wins-ge-grant/



A Massachusetts Company Won an NFL-Backed Grant Challenge
Hayden Bird
08/10/15 @10:35am

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.

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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).