BHR Pharma LLC, a subsidiary of the Belgian company Besins Healthcare SA, has been named the sole licensee of a new treatment that could very well be a monumental cure for traumatic brain injuries caused by serious debilitating blows to the head. The two-year old company is using a new treatment that involves the female hormone progesterone in eliminating and solving the effects of TBI.
In cooperation with Emory University, which granted the license to BHR Pharma’s President Tom MacAllister, the company plans to begin clinical trials in the beginning of 2010, recruiting recent victims of motor vehicle accidents with serious brain injuries from emergency rooms throughout the U.S. In all, BHR Pharma will begin clinical trials with 1,200 victims from 120 emergency rooms, while Emory University will conduct its own trials with 1,140 victims in 17 medical centers across the country. Both sets of clinical trials are purely cooperative and not competitive.
The progesterone treatment was invented in the 1980s, and was developed further by Emory’s Don Stein. BHR Pharma’s team will be able to use its own clinical trial results as well as the Emory trial results in manufacturing a complete treatment for federal approval. Researchers and medical professionals agree that this treatment is revolutionary, in that it is the first of its kind in suppressing and reversing secondary cell damage in the brain after serious trauma induced by an automobile accident.
Once approval is gained by BHR Pharma, the company intends to use the final treatment for victims within eight hours of their automobile accidents. For five days, the progesterone solution will be filtered into the victim’s system, as the hormone will reduce all inflammation in the brain and reverse the body’s natural inclination toward the spread of secondary cell damage.
Currently, there are no U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs or treatments for traumatic brain injuries, meaning that if BHR Pharma is successful the company will have pulled off a coup in modern medical science. With more than one million cases of TBI reported in U.S. emergency rooms each year, doctors and medical experts have only been able to use emergency surgery to treat these brain injuries.