In 1997, Domenico Pratico, a third year University of Pennsylvania postdoc, was seeking funding for his molecular research on brain aging and neurodegeneration. For nearly three years, his lab had worked on developing a specific, sensitive new assay to measure oxidative stress in a patient's brain. The results were promising, but he knew he didn't have enough data for an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).












