NAD+ Therapy in Miami

NAD+ was first discovered by the British biochemist Sir Arthur Harden and the Scottish biochemist William John Young in 1906 while studying fermentation. Fermentation is the process in which certain yeast cells break down sugar molecules to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. Harden was nominated for the Nobel Prize for his work on fermentation and 20 years later, in 1929, he was honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Hans von Euler-Chelpin, for his discovery. By further examination of the process of fermentation, Euler-Chelpin discovered that NAD+ is formed of two nucleotides. These nucleotides are the basic units of nucleic acids which comprise DNA. In humans, the key role of NAD+ in metabolic processes was found years after it was discovered by Harden and Young in yeast cells.

According to his 1930 Nobel Prize speech, Euler-Chelpin called the molecule we now know as NAD⁺ “cozymase” because he thought it was a snappy name. He described it as “vital” and said he and his colleagues studied it at length because “cozymase is one of the most widely distributed and of the greatest biological importance for animals and plants.”

A biologically essential principle of cancer biochemistry was first described by Otto Heinrich Warburg, who received the Nobel Prize in 1931 for his discoveries in relation to respiration. The research on NAD contributed considerably to the understanding of the Warburg effect. In 1931, the American chemists Conrad A. Elvehjem and C.K. Koehn isolated from edible products the pellagra-preventing compound they identified as nicotinic acid. The American United States Public Health Service Doctor Joseph Goldberger was, already before his death, very close to the solution and realized that pellagra was due to the lack of some dietary factor, which he called PPF, the pellagra preventive factor. As the solution to the puzzle was provided after Goldberger’s death, he also contributed significantly to international legislation concerning the enrichment of flours and rice.

According to his own accounts, Nobel Laureate Arthur Kornberg discovered the enzyme responsible for the synthesis of the molecule NAD⁺ over the next decade. The start of the NAD⁺ journey had begun. In 1958, scientists Jack Preiss and Philip Handler would go on to describe the steps required to convert nicotinic acid into NAD⁺, describing it as the Preiss-Handler pathway. Interestingly, nicotinic acid is the form of Vitamin B3 that cured pellagra. By describing this pathway, they made progress in the understanding of how vitamin B3 can be used as a source of NAD⁺. Some 30 years later, President Ronald Reagan would award Philip Handler the National Medal of Science. The medal recognized Handler’s “outstanding contributions to biomedical research; and his efforts to further the advance of science in the United States.”

Scientists had finally realized how important NAD⁺ was for the body, but they had no idea how it was affecting the cells. With advances in technology and an increasing awareness of the role of the coenzyme in the body, scientists were encouraged to carry on their research.