Dominic D'Agostino

Nobody heard of the ketogenic diet.

And what year was this?

This was around 2005.

I started tinkering with ketones, but 2007, I started writing grants and then I hit on a grant in 2008, postdoctoral grant.

I had a weird position from postdoc to something called a research assistant professor, which is like an intermediate position before you get into a tenure track.

And the university was just gauging to see my productivity.

My postdoctoral grant was very sizable.

It was above like an NIH level grant, which I was getting paid full indirects.

That came from the military.

Yeah.

Office of Navy Research is part of the Department of Defense.

And then I got good data on hyperbaric atomic force microscopy, very mechanistic research.

I also did patch clamp electrophysiology and confocal microscopy.

My work was really focused on redox mechanisms and looking at superoxide production under graded levels of oxygen and different metabolites.

So in the process of doing all that, I had no interest in cancer, but we had some glial blastoma cells and we threw them into the hyperbaric chamber.

And under confocal microscopy, we could see the mitochondria were lighting up and then kind of exploding or disappearing in the cancer cells.

And that was kind of unique.

And that led me on a side tangent thing to study cancer.

But my central thing that I studied was neuroscience.

I've been in neuroscience department and mainly focused on that.