The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis follows science and steady funding to a broader mission

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 countless times that it was a problem that couldn’t be fixed. The Buonicontis didn’t listen.

Instead, through the fund that bears their name, they have helped raise more than $550 million for The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, and improved the lives of millions with spinal cord and brain injuries.

“The Buoniconti Fund has lasted because we’re 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 that determination, that refusal to quit that’s kept us going all these years.”

That drive has also led The Miami Project to expand its work beyond curing paralysis. Its research center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine now also studies neurological diseases and disorders including Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, and it is testing the brain-computer interface implant from Elon Musk’s technology company Neuralink.

Changing medicine by creating a hub for paralysis work

Dr. Barth A. Green, chairman of The Miami Project, who co-founded the organization in 1985 with Nick Buoniconti, says the most surprising developments from the center have been the broadest ones.

“Every operating room in the world that puts people to sleep monitors their nervous system for safety,” Dr. Green said. “That was all 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 been working on helping those who had been paralyzed for 20 years. Yet there wasn’t a hub for that work until The Miami Project was established.

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 people’s everyday quality of life and their opportunities to have more function and a better opportunity to be mobile and do things they never dreamt they could before.”

Unexpected advances through multidisciplinary approaches

Miami Project Scientific Director W. Dalton Dietrich III said gathering those people from a variety of disciplines – neuroscientists, researchers, clinicians, biomedical engineers – into one building has led to unexpected advances.

“Not one particular treatment is going to cure paralysis,” Dietrich said. “So I’ve tried to look at other disciplines to bring into the project to help us achieve that goal.”

One new, multidisciplinary area, neuromodulation, is “something we never thought about 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 early trials. That, in turn, makes it easier to eventually receive grants from government agencies like the National Institutes of Health or the Department of Defense, Dietrich said.

Marc Buoniconti says “it’s hard to put into words” seeing 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,” he said. “Every resource, every dollar, every hour given is a testament to the belief that we can change lives.”

Mark Dalton, chairman and CEO of Tudor Investment Corp., said that belief resonated with him and made him want to get involved with The Buonicontis even before he met them.

“I had tremendous admiration for him as a father who was never going to give up on finding a cure for what ailed 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 science-driven approach. Its setting on a university campus was also important to the former chairman of the board of trustees at Denison and Vanderbilt universities.

“They put the line in the water,” said Dalton, who now chairs the Buoniconti Fund’s biggest annual fundraiser, The Great Sports Legends Dinner. “They hooked me. I’m all in.”

That’s a common feeling around The Miami Project, which counts legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus and Grammy winner Gloria Estefan among its supporters. And it’s something Marc Buoniconti says he does not take for granted.

He hopes The Miami Project’s work will continue to expand.

“My biggest dream is for our researchers to find a way to fully repair the nervous system,” Buoniconti said. “When we do that, we’ll change the entire landscape for paralysis and so many other neuro conditions. We’ll give so many people their lives back. That’s what keeps me going, and that’s what makes every struggle to this point worth it.”

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