Dominic D'Agostino

So they talked about the ketogenic diet being curative.

And that was really interesting to me.

Of course, the brain is changing as you go through development, but it was shifting brain networks and network stability, suppressing inflammation and changing neurotransmitters in a way that there's the kindling effect with seizures.

So seizures beget seizures.

So once you have a seizure, you're more likely to have another seizure.

So if you control seizures and you do it through a protracted timeframe, it's going to lessen the chance of you, it's going to decrease that kindling effect.

So there's something going on there.

And we've replicated that just throwing sodium beta-hydroxybutyrate into a hippocampal brain slice preparation under different levels of things that stimulate seizures, like measuring seizures in a slice.

When like the orthodromic population, you can stimulate and measure the orthodromic population spike of the neurons like firing back.

And then you can decrease the amplitude of that over time and essentially just silence seizures in a slice.

And at the same time, you're making that hippocampal brain slice more metabolically resilient.

You could throw different agents at it that would be neurodegenerative or hyper excitable, and it will protect it under the context of various neurotoxins.

I think that really interested me.

So the early observations, and then I was completely unaware of all this literature in my postdoc.

And then when I started delving into it, I was like, I have to change the trajectory of my career, but I'm going to do it in an innovative way.

I'm going to study the ketogenic diet, but also in parallel or in tandem, or maybe in some cases exclusively, just delve into what is the most efficacious form of exogenous ketone we can use and how can it

augment the therapeutic efficacy of a ketogenic diet.

There's a lot to unpack here and nobody was doing it at the time.

The clinical ketogenic diet where I got the little cardio check meter, which was super expensive at the time, I would say 2009, I started actually checking ketones.

I was using the Abbott one.