A former league footballer who became a quadriplegic after an on-field accident is spearheading fundraising efforts to create an imaging system to help diagnose spinal cord injuries in Australia.
Neil Sachse hopes Project Discovery, which has just been launched in Adelaide, can raise $1 million.
Sachse was a South Australian footballer who moved to Victoria to play with VFL side Footscray, until he was injured in 1975.
He did not get home from hospital until nine months after his on-field accident, he told 891 ABC Adelaide.
“When you have an injury you lose all the feeling and all the mobility below the actual injury,” he explained.
Sachse said medical staff stuck pins into his body over days to work out the precise site of his spinal cord injury and that method was still in use to this day.
“It’s pretty traumatic for the person that’s undergoing it to go through all this pin pricking and it goes on for days,” he said.
“What we want to do is create an imaging system using the new cyclotron at SAHMRI (South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute) to produce isotopes,” he said of the fundraising project.
He explained the isotopes could be injected into a patient and a PET (positron emission tomography) scanner then used to see which spinal cells remained alive and which had died.
“It’s not as intrusive. You can actually see the spinal cord and diagnostics would become a lot better,” he said.
The new cyclotron at the Health and Medical Research Institute premises in Adelaide is SA’s first and lets local researchers manufacture and supply radioisotopes for clinical and medical research.
Sachse said the director of the Molecular Imaging and Therapy Research Unit, Prab Tahkar, was extremely hopeful of advancing spinal cord injury diagnosis.
“He’s extremely confident of what he can do with the cyclotron and he believes these isotopes will be quite easy to produce, but it just requires the money to do it,” he said.
The former footballer said about 400 Australians annually suffered a spinal cord injury and he was hopeful better diagnosis and treatment was getting closer.
A range of fundraising ideas, some of them involving football, are under consideration as the ex-footballer’s Neil Sachse Foundation tries to achieve its $1 million target.