The country”™s most valuable sports league will tap into the medical imaging expertise of General Electric Co. as part of a joint venture aimed at solving the biggest problem facing football today: concussions.
The National Football League, rated by Forbes as the most valuable professional sports league in the U.S., will partner with GE and Under Armour Inc. as part of the four-year, $60 million Head Health Initiative to study, develop treatments for and ultimately help prevent sports-related concussions.
The initiative was unveiled at a news conference last week at GE”™s 30 Rockefeller Plaza offices, with the NFL facing numerous lawsuits from former players over its treatment of on-field head injuries and with more than 175,000 people under the age of 19 treated in U.S. emergency rooms for head trauma each year.
Enter GE, the Fairfield-based industrial conglomerate that ranks among the world”™s largest manufacturers of medical imaging devices, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems.
GE and the NFL will jointly invest $40 million over four years in the development of next-generation imaging technologies that would allow for more reliable diagnosis of head injuries, such as concussions, and that would improve treatment for patients with mild brain trauma.
“For all the advances in science, our knowledge of the brain is far behind that of nearly every other organ in the body,” said GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt in a statement.
Immelt said the initiative would not only advance research that could be applied to sports-related concussions, but that the studies could aid in the treatment of members of the military suffering from head injuries as well as people with diseases like Alzheimer”™s and Parkinson”™s. “Advancing brain science will help families everywhere,” he said.
A GE spokeswoman said the company would work with an expert medical advisory board “to determine the scope and execution of the research.” The board is to include neurologists from across the country, the director of the U.S. Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, and the chief medical officer of the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), among others.
The initiative caps a series of efforts by the NFL and its Players Association to improve player safety.
A group of about 4,000 former players has filed a class action lawsuit against the NFL, seeking damages for head injuries they sustained on the field and subsequently were not properly treated for.
The remaining $20 million that comprises the Head Health project will be rewarded through a two-year “open innovation challenge,” for which GE, Under Armour and the NFL are soliciting proposals from third-party firms.
The partners will award up to $10 million for proposals for technologies and imaging biomarkers ”” which serve as genetic identification tags ”” that seek to help identify and manage sub-clinical and mild traumatic brain injury.
The second challenge calls for proposals for materials and technologies that can protect the brain from injury ”” such as high-tech helmets ”” as well as new tools that can track head injuries in real-time.
“We recognize the magnitude of this initiative, and the impact it will have for athletes at all levels,” said Kevin Plank, founder and CEO of Under Armour, which is based in Baltimore.
