- As awareness of the long-term hazards of concussive head injuries for young athletes has increased during the past decade, advocates and business enterprises have stepped up to improve coach responsiveness to players’ condition
- While efforts primarily focus on assessing injury, Odyssey Health Inc. is developing a product it hopes to become the first drug device with FDA approval for treating a concussed patient after injury
- Odyssey is enrolling patients in a Phase 1 human clinical trial after completing pre-clinical studies in laboratory animals
- The medical research company’s assets include treatments for patients who may have undiagnosed heart disease, patients choking on some type of obstruction lodged in their throats and patients dealing with a rare neurodegenerative disorder
Sports-related concussions have gained a growing degree of attention during the past decade, thanks largely to the activism of a junior high school football player severely injured during a game who continued to play despite a hard impact to the head he had experienced (https://ibn.fm/bb79K).
His story led to what has become known as the Lystedt Law, a series of head safety standards for youth athletes pioneered in Washington state and eventually adopted by all 50 states. Among professional athletes, concerns have been raised by players such as former Team U.S.A. soccer forward Bruce Murray’s, whose efforts to raise concussion awareness stem from head injuries he believes have left him with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (“CTE”), an incurable condition characterized by trouble with memory, problems organizing and planning simple activities, and changes in behavior, such as lack of motivation or having a short temper, but only truly diagnosable in deceased patients (https://ibn.fm/aAPGU).
Former Denver Broncos football player Demaryius Thomas was one such athlete diagnosed with CTE after his death (https://ibn.fm/P9ziU).
Head impact injuries can affect athletes in a wide variety of sports, and numerous enterprises have manufactured devices designed to help measure injury among them. Head Impact Trauma Ltd. founder Euan Bowen, for example, was inspired by his rugby experience to create a headband and sensor system that measures cranial G-force but his product has been adopted by downhill mountain bike racers as well (https://ibn.fm/M9X6t).
And a group of engineering students at Old Dominion University created an award-winning accelerometer designed to be affordable even for small schools interested in assessing head impacts in young players (https://ibn.fm/LHuAz).
Medical device innovator and biopharmaceutical product developer Odyssey Health (OTC: ODYY) is focusing on the concussion injury issue from the vantage point of treating individuals after they’ve been hurt. There is no medication approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) at this point for treating specific concussion injuries, but Odyssey is preparing for human trials of a product it believes may fill that gap.
“We provide a clinical advantage in the marketplace,” CEO Michael Redmond told The RedChip Money Report(R) on Bloomberg TV last month. “We have a very unique new chemical entity intended to treat mild traumatic brain injury — the acute phase of a concussion. It’s a small device. It essentially goes and delivers a powderized drug through the upper chambers of the nasal cavity. The drug crosses the blood-brain barrier within five minutes. It spreads out throughout the brain within 30 minutes and reverses the effects of a concussion” (https://ibn.fm/sZXWV).
The Phase 1 clinical trial is enrolling 48 patients and will follow completed preclinical lab animal testing.
Odyssey also is developing a prototype device for diagnosing heart disease and another for saving people choking on an obstruction that it hopes to have before the FDA for approval by year’s end.
For more information, visit the company’s website at www.OdysseyHealthInc.com.
NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to ODYY are available in the company’s newsroom at https://ibn.fm/ODYY
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