Exploring NAD and Aging: A Holistic Drug Discovery Approach

In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, molecular biologist Dr. Nichola Conlon joins me to talk about the role of a little molecule found in every cell in your body that has a huge impact on aging. She specializes in the study of aging as a biologically complex disorder, specifically the role of NAD+ (Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide). 

You’re going to learn about how NAD+ works in the body from this scientist who was named one of 2021’s Coolest Female Founders of UK Tech Making Huge Impacts.

Dr. Conlon says a key thing for people to understand is to go back to why NAD+ actually declines. “You really need to understand actually how NAD+ is produced by the cells when they're young.”

NAD+ is a natural molecule found in every cell in our bodies. It’s involved in energy production, helping convert the food you eat into the energy your cells need to stay alive. It is an activator of longevity proteins that are associated with cellular health and good aging, DNA repair and more. But as you get older, those NAD+ levels rapidly decline. Dr. Conlon explored why.

“It's become a lot more apparent recently that it's not just energy production that NAD+ is involved with,” Dr. Conlon says. “It's also involved in cellular maintenance and repair. It's almost like the fuel which switches on different enzymes and different processes. NAD+ is critical and actually driving DNA repair and making sure that DNA repair enzymes get to the damage site and do the job that is required.”

She says she got frustrated with the lag time between scientific discovery and actually getting new supplements and drugs to consumers—often a process of 10 to 15 years. “It's like all of science is encapsulated in this bubble, where it never actually gets out to real people in the outside world,” Dr. Conlon says. 

So, she took her years of expertise focused on early stage drug discovery with a leading biotech firm and founded Nuchido. She uses a “systems pharmacology” approach to look at the complexity of our individual biology because there’s no single magic bullet for any ailment. Systems pharmacology has three main principles that differ from conventional pharmaceutical discovery, Dr. Conlon says.

• “Biology is really complex and there is a lot going on and it is very robust. It's built to withstand impact generally and it doesn't ignore that. It actually looks at every single gene, every single pathway, every single protein, every single feedback, feedforward, inhibition, everything that is going on and almost looks at it as a big network.”
• “It’s never, ever scientifically plausible to take a single target approach. Try to put your finger on one tiny little piece of that massive complex puzzle, it's just never going to work,”
• “You've got to take a multi targeted approach and look at the best combinations of targets within all of that complexity and understand how you can target them.”

Nuchido looked at NAD+ through that lens and wanted to repair the ways our bodies lose that NAD. Dr. Conlon and her team of scientists and scientific advisors– several who are giants in the field of biogerontology–identified the right combination of targets to restore cellular NAD+ production back to youthful levels, leading to the development of a breakthrough NAD+ booster called Nuchido TIME+. 

The TIME+ booster restores and improves the cell’s ability to make and recycle its own NAD+, makes cells more efficient at making NAD+ again, stops cells from wasting NAD+, and reboots the efficiency of your salvage pathway recycling. Your cell function improves and you get your energy back. Pretty cool!

Dr. Conlon says, “I think people don't realize how their energy is actually really pretty bad and the brain fog is pretty bad, and then all of a sudden when it's gone, they're like, ‘Wow! I feel like I can breathe again. I've been living under a cloud.’”

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