How is the standardisations and research going regarding Lion's Mane and other mushroom supplements?

It's going well. Much slower because of COVID. Our researcher is in the EU, and travel restrictions have made it so he cannot get out here... I built him a full mushroom lab, and it is just sitting here waiting for those restrictions to be lifted. He has been working in a small makeshift lab in the EU, so things are progressing. However, he is doing a lot of things manually that our new equipment here would make much quicker work of. For instance, he is doing manual column chromatography to separate erinacines from each other to concentrate, where our prep HPLC here would do it 100X faster. Still moving, but slow. As of today we have erinacine-A reference standards made, and identification/quantification methods complete on our UPLC-MS. We also have 3 other erinacines as standards, but we have not elucidated which is which yet. So we can identify and quantify the peaks, but we can't say which erinacine they are yet. We have used our erinacine-A standards and methods to test a bunch of product on the market so far. So far we have found no appreciable amount in any retail product. None. That includes the other 3 erinacines we have isolated. We did find it in our R&D product we made. So I have personally taken a high erinacine-A extract a handful of times now. We are also working with the researchers that published those two human studies back in July, and I have some of their extract at our facility as well. I have taken that a few times myself, too. They are very interesting. They feel totally different than fruiting body extracts, but that is to be expected. I personally like our extract better, but I am still waiting on data to determine why that might be. It's still early stages, but we are close to bringing out a retail product made from cultured lion's mane mycelium actually standardized to erinacines.

The hericenones are going to take more time. That is going to require the equipment we have in the lab. Since fucking COVID doesn't seem to be dying down anytime soon, I am actually in the process of just building a new lab in the EU. I can't keep waiting for this shit to be over why all these jabronis make fake numbers and mislead people. We tested their shit. They DO NOT contain what they claim. Full stop. It's all lies. I was hoping to have all the science and validation done by this time, but these travel restrictions fucked us. So we are doing the best we can. Since I can't predict when this pandemic will end, I am just going to spend the money and buy a second set of equipment in the EU. We are also hiring another analytical chemist here in Arizona to mirror the work being done in the EU at the same time. So while this solution is insanely more expensive than I planned, at least we will have dual lab operations running on different continents. It's better for disaster recovery reasons anyway, and we were already expanding our EU operations with organic synthesis lab operations for stuff like adrafinil, so building on a mushroom lab there makes sense, albeit a bit expensive. Ohh well! 2020 has been a hell of a year, and all we can do it try to make the best of it.

Although I wonder if we'll ever discover what makes fruiting bodies promote NGF if it is clearly shown in research, but supposedly it's not the hericenones.

It's absolutely hericenones in the fruiting body. No doubt about it. Those are what is leading to the beneficial effects from the fruiting bodies.

And also not the erinacines as it is not present in the fruiting body?

Correct. We have also proven that now as well. There are no erinacines in the fruiting bodies. We have confirmed this on UPLC-MS. It's just the way that the life cycle of the lion's mane mushroom works. I can't go into detail too much, as I don't want to clue competitors into the trick. However, there is a very real reason lion's mane make erinacines in the mycelial stage, which does not happen in the fruiting stage. Want to know the funny thing? There is a compound in the fruiting bodies that fluoresces just like erinacine-A does, but it is NOT an erinacine. It's another terpene. Well all these other schmucks are using a UV terpene method to "quantify" the erinacines and hericenones in their products, but they are actually measuring a completely different compound. So all these people claiming 5% erinacines a shit like that are giving fake numbers. We tested theirs shit. They are using shitty scientific methods to improperly measure things they don't understand, and are lying to customers in the process. There is a reason we have been taking so long to bring out a lion's mane mycelium product. Making and testing it properly is not an easy process. When we do release one, and I am hoping that is soon, you can be sure we have made a quality product that is backed by validated science.