N.O. Brainer

It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

Dr Nicolas Bazan is a world-renowned neuroscientist with a research lab in Stockholm Sweden and another here in New Orleans. When Dr Bazan was a guest on Out to Lunch, he pointed out that, compared to other fields of medicine, treatment for conditions of the human brain are at a primitive stage. For example, the current standard of care for Traumatic Brain Injury is “rest.”

Part of the reason there’s no medication for neurological conditions like dementia, Alzheimer’s and Parkinsons is the way pharmacological research is conducted.

For obvious reasons, there are rigorous controls on the development of neurological drugs before they’re allowed to be tested on humans. The only new medications that are allowed to be trialed by humans are ones that have proven safe in trials on animals. But an astounding 94% of these neurological drugs fail - because preclinical results on animals can’t predict results in humans.

It’s with this is mind that Lowry Curley founded his revolutionary biomedical research company, AxoSim. AxoSim simulates brain cells, so drug developers can try out a drug on a human brain without having an actual human being attached to it.

We last talked to Lowry when this was all just getting off the ground, in 2016, a couple of years after the company was founded in New Orleans. Today, AxoSim has two laboratories, 30 employees, 3 separate research divisions, and a bunch of industry-leading patents.

The human brain is a delicate organ. That’s why it’s housed in a hard case: the skull. But there are some activities where even the skull and a protective helmet aren’t enough to prevent the brain from getting injured. One of those activities is military combat.

Veterans who lose limbs in combat have established pathways to recovery. But veterans with brain injury, spinal cord injury, or other neurological conditions can go undiagnosed. Veterans who struggle with these issues find themselves isolated and lonely – part of the reason for the high rate of veteran suicide.

Here in New Orleans a program called Headway is setting out to solve these issues by placing affected veterans in a purpose-built housing development, called Bastion Community of Resilience.

It's a $14m, five-and-a-half acre neighborhood of homes in Gentilly in which veterans with neurological wounds live among other veterans, and volunteers.

We spoke with the founder of Bastion, Dylan Tete, back in 2016 when the site was under construction. Today Bastion is a living neighborhood and we’re joined by it’s Executive Director, Jackson Smith.

For a medium-sized city in the south of the United States, New Orleans gets a lot of publicity.

Most of it - even when it’s generated by our own city and state agencies - focuses on what a great place New Orleans is to eat, drink, and listen to music.

And, it is. But we’re so much more than that. One of these days maybe we’ll also be recognized for being the home of AxoSim, a company that’s revolutionizing neurological medical research, and the Bastion Community of Resilience, pioneering healthcare and the welfare of military veterans.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

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