The Baszucki’s personal involvement in the promotion of this type of research is due to one of their kids suffering many years from bipolar psychosis and the extremely positive response he had to medical ketogenic diet - please watch the videos posted here before jumping into uninformed and very unfair conclusions.
yes that's great. rah rah rah. But is their type of funding as transparent as the NIH model? What is their grant review process? And are they willing to sustain the careers of multiple full time faculty/research personnel, clinical trial costs, etc?
Who owns the IP coming out of the research? Stanford or Baszucki?
From what I've seen, Stanford pays docs without NIH backing peanuts, and the faculty environment seems overly hostile. I've lost track of junior faculty that get a nice shiny Stanford Health system job fresh out of training, and 2 years later, they're somewhere else.
The fishy part is - it is hard for any one organization to "unilaterally" kill a trial if it is legit, irb approved, etc. If it is a political situation at one institution, people often move and take their grant funding with them. Keto diet trials aren't super complicated - if UMD wanted to restructure that unit, it would be easy for the PIs to set up shop either, say, across town at an equivalent psych ward at Johns Hopkins, or even do it privately via a CRO (contract research organization), etc.
