It's an intimidating and overwhelming process. Josh (ingenium) and I went to a multi-week university seminar for faculty spinning off research into commercial ventures and the speaker on NSF grants said that it's really tough to get government grants without hiring a consultant who knows the ins and outs of the system. This will be something to do as soon as we have a spare $10,000, but we don't have any spare capital for now.

We also need a PhD on board... we haven't looked for a faculty sponsor because if we get someone from the University of Pittsburgh on board, Pitt owns all of our IP. Pitt has a much worse IP policy than many other large universities; PG and I had this discussion a while ago on here and he posted the link for MIT's tech transfer policy which was much more reasonable.

Basically, Josh and I aren't qualified to lead the research, in the eyes of the government. But Josh is pretty good at what he does and I am confident we could lead a team of Biology PhDs pretty well. They have really low salaries in Pittsburgh too, $40,000 is the starting salary for a post-doc and $100,000 and a pittance of equity would get you anyone you wanted that didn't have tenure at a university.

You can also only get NSF/NIH funding if it has been posted as a "Funding opportunity" or "Funding notice." They don't take unsolicited ideas; they say in advance what ideas they are funding. I hadn't looked at these for a while and I see we may have just missed one that may have been relevant. It's not exactly the idea above and I really don't know if the process is flexible enough to allow for our adult stem cell treatment. http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-AI-07-014.h...

It seems to me that Josh and I aren't going to be able to get government funding without handing our IP over to the University of Pittsburgh, and I have no desire to have to deal with academia. So that means we need to wait until we are independently wealthy to start researching. I also feel that we kind of have a moral prerogative to get research in this area moving forward, and I'm not sure what else we can be doing. We've casually mentioned this treatment technique to various PhDs and MDs and they unanimously say "Yes, that could work." However, they don't say "That's the best idea I've ever heard and I'm going to get be your Principal Investigator for an NIH grant."

Can you think of anything else we could be doing? For now, we're just bootstrapping our genetic testing company and seeing where that takes us.