After his son was paralyzed, an NFL Hall of Famer decided to find a cure. 40 years and $550 million later, his foundation is recognized for improving millions of lives:
Marc Buoniconti said his father, the late NFL Hall of Famer Nick Buoniconti, explained the secret to the success of their nonprofit and its fundraising efforts simply: “We’re just not good listeners.” »
In the 40 years since Marc Buoniconti, then a college football linebacker at The Citadel, was paralyzed during a routine tackle, they have been told repeatedly that it was a problem that couldn’t be fixed. The Buonicontis did not listen.
Instead, through the fund that bears their name, they helped raise more than $550 million for the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and improved the lives of millions of people suffering from spinal cord and brain injuries.
“The Buoniconti Fund has lasted because we are relentless,” Marc Buoniconti recently told the Associated Press. “We never give up. When we see a challenge, we face it head on and don’t stop until we find a solution. It’s this determination, this refusal to quit that has kept us going all these years.”
This desire also led the Miami Project to expand its work beyond curing paralysis. Its research center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine is now also studying neurological diseases and disorders, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and testing the brain-computer interface implant from Elon Musk’s technology company Neuralink.
Change medicine by creating a work center on paralysis
Dr. Barth A. Green, president of the Miami Project, who co-founded the organization in 1985 with Nick Buoniconti, says the center’s most surprising developments have been its broadest.
“Every operating room in the world that puts people to sleep monitors their nervous systems for safety,” Dr. Green said. “All of this was developed at the Miami Project.”
Therapeutic hypothermia, where the body is cooled after an injury to protect the brain and spinal cord, is another widely used treatment developed at the center.
Dr. Green said that before Buoniconti’s accident, he had worked for 20 years helping paralyzed people. Yet there was no center for this work until the creation of the Miami Project.
It provided a home for him and “thousands of scientists and researchers in Miami and around the world, who were equally engaged by the opportunity to change the quality of people’s daily lives and their opportunities to have more functions and a better opportunity to be mobile and do things they never imagined they could before.” »
Unexpected advances thanks to multidisciplinary approaches
The Miami Project’s scientific director, W. Dalton Dietrich III, said bringing together people from diverse disciplines — neuroscientists, researchers, clinicians, biomedical engineers — in one building led to unexpected advances.
“No specific treatment will cure paralysis,” Dietrich said. “So I tried to consider other disciplines to bring into the project to help us achieve this goal.”
A new multidisciplinary field, neuromodulation, is “something we never thought of five years ago,” Dietrich said. “It’s just an exciting area where you can stimulate these residual circuits after brain injury or spinal cord injury in patients and they start moving their limbs.”
The Buoniconti Fund’s support for the center helps accelerate research in these areas by funding initial trials. That, in turn, makes it easier to get grants from government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health or the Department of Defense, Dietrich said.
Marc Buoniconti says “it’s hard to express” to see so many people rally behind him and the millions of others who have been paralyzed.
“What started as a promise to help me walk again became a mission to help millions of people,” he said. “Every resource, every dollar, every hour donated demonstrates the belief that we can change lives. »
Mark Dalton, co-chairman of Tudor Investment Corp., said that belief resonated with him and made him want to get involved with The Buonicontis even before meeting them.
“I had immense admiration for him as a father who was never going to give up on finding a cure for the ills that afflicted his son,” Dalton said. “And his son was a representation of millions of other people.”
“They hooked me”
Once he learned more about the Miami Project, Dalton said he was impressed by its scientific approach. Its location on a college campus was also important to the former chairman of the board of trustees of Denison and Vanderbilt universities.
“They cast the line,” said Dalton, who now chairs the Buoniconti Fund’s largest annual fundraiser, the Great Sports Legends Dinner. “They got me hooked. I’m all in.”
It’s a common sentiment among the Miami Project, whose supporters include legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus and Grammy winner Gloria Estefan. And that’s something Marc Buoniconti says he doesn’t take for granted.
He hopes the Miami Project’s work will continue to grow.
“My biggest dream is that our researchers find a way to completely repair the nervous system,” Buoniconti said. “When we do this, we will change the entire landscape in favor of paralysis and so many other neurological diseases. We will give back the lives of so many people. That’s what keeps me going, and that’s what makes every fight so far worth it.”
