Reply To: Look at this

[Brian H]

AaronB wrote: It looks like they’ve used close to half of their funding of $7.8M. I’m experiencing funding envy and just drooled on my keyboard. 🙂

Heh. “Vitamin M”. (=Money)
If you’ll excuse a short digression here, that term was used by a doctor I was in contact with about her psoriasis, and using Glycerin to alleviate it (a long term interest and crusade of mine). (It didn’t help her as much as I’d hoped, as she has the most severe form of it. It’s so bad it aborted her research career at Harvard, and she now works in geriatrics when she can.)

Anyhow, we were discussing the original 2002 Georgia Med School animal studies on it, and the lack of follow-up with human clinical and biological studies, except for some effort to find patentable precursors and downstream compounds in cells. Glycerin (= glycerol, a 3-carbon alcohol) is public, generic, dirt cheap, and a glut on the market (byproduct of cooking and salad oil production, and from biofuel refinement, and many other processes), not suitable for generating income streams, so pharmas and even universities (heavily funded by same) aren’t much interested — as she said, “No Vitamin M”. Which, in her direct experience in the research labs, is a fatal deficiency.

Sort of reminds me of Eric’s ostracization and loss of co-authors when he early on threatened to put up his low-cost alternative to Big Fusion: no immediate flows of “Vitamin M” for the profession.