Reminiscent of robotic surgery - it took years for surgical outcomes on these platforms to actually improve on average outcomes over manual surgery, and for individual surgeons, the learning curve was also unfavorable.
Prostate surgery was a leading application for robot surgery because it's challenging to access the prostate and remove cancerous parts while preserving nerve/prostate function. A decade ago I saw a robotic prostate surgeon at a leading (ivy) research university hospital present data showing that although it could achieve superior outcomes (quicker return to urinary continence, faster mean return time of erection), a surgeon needed to perform literally hundreds-to-thousands of robotic surgeries before they could achieve equivalency in outcomes, and then to get to superiority. A surgeon in training could achieve statistically average outcomes via traditional laparoscopic prostate surgery much faster. Mind you, this was literally a decade after the daVinci was approved for this type of surgery (FDA approved in 2001).
And how does this number compare to the number of people who refused to take precautionary measures such as masking and vaccines due to Twitter echo chamber, and then died of COVID? Very sad, and I feel so bad for those people and their kids.
I'm not sure that leaving details out of the proposal is really that smart. It seems like we're doing the public a disservice by excluding them from the kind of information traditional funding sources use to make allocation decisions, because it reduces the basis for making funding decisions on all proposed research to oversimplified descriptions, while providing no insight into traditional research funding.
In other words, people can get duped into funding research that is not as well founded as this one (supposedly), and we pass over a key opportunity to teach the public how organizations like the NIH make funding decisions. Maybe if people had an idea about how rigorously funding proposals are analyzed they would be less likely to cut science funding because of inane arguments like Sarah Palin made about public funding to study fruit flies.
Maybe it's just me, but looking at molecular accumulation in this way doesn't seem that promising. However, there are other problems here...
In order to get this kind of research funded in a traditional way, the author would need a much more detailed explanation of the work: specifically, a compelling and well-referenced account of why drug accumulation in mouse brain sections will be helpful in understanding the mechanism of stimulant function. I would also like to see more detailed methodology and an account of how the researcher will responsibly conduct the research (in terms of accounting for hazardous materials and maintaining researcher safety). These are essential components that any PI would need to provide in order to get research funded, because they are necessary to ensure that the researcher can actually conduct the research (has the knowledge and resources), and get it published (missing some of these features would prevent publication in an academic journal).
It seems to me that other kinds of analysis, such as molecular state-space based approaches (transcriptomics, metabolomics, etc.) would be much more useful than cellular and sub-cellular accumulation, especially since we have very little knowledge of how spatial tissue, cellular, and sub-cellular neurobiology relate to brain function.
Please let me know if I just missed these essential details...
Prostate surgery was a leading application for robot surgery because it's challenging to access the prostate and remove cancerous parts while preserving nerve/prostate function. A decade ago I saw a robotic prostate surgeon at a leading (ivy) research university hospital present data showing that although it could achieve superior outcomes (quicker return to urinary continence, faster mean return time of erection), a surgeon needed to perform literally hundreds-to-thousands of robotic surgeries before they could achieve equivalency in outcomes, and then to get to superiority. A surgeon in training could achieve statistically average outcomes via traditional laparoscopic prostate surgery much faster. Mind you, this was literally a decade after the daVinci was approved for this type of surgery (FDA approved in 2001).