#268 Autophagy and NAD+ for Longevity - Dr Elena Seranova

Elena Seranova (0:00)

There is no one magical pill that will make all of the bad stuff go away and will make you live forever, right? So it needs to be an effort on a daily basis.

Siim Land (0:10)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host, Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Elena Seranova. Elena has a Ph.D. in Stem Cell Biology and Autophagy from the University of Birmingham. She also has a Master's degree in Transnational Neuroscience and is the founder of NMN Bio.

In this episode, we talk about the details of the process of autophagy and how does it work with NAD. This episode is brought to you by Self Decode. Self Decode is a genetics decoding company. You can get personalized health recommendations based on your DNA and the latest scientific research. They have numerous different DNA reports for different areas of focus like weight loss, longevity, gastrointestinal health, cognition and even mood. Recently Self Decode came out with their 2 software that incorporates artificial intelligence in generating DNA reports. It's the most advanced and comprehensive consumer DNA service in the world.

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Dr. Elena, welcome to the show.

Elena Seranova (1:09)

Yes, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Siim Land (1:13)

Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you because you're one of the few scientists who actually does research about this thing called autophagy. That's something that I am really interested in myself and a lot of people are also curious about. You have a full scholar profile full of different kinds of studies that you've been involved with about autophagy and those kind of things.

So how did you become an autophagy scientist?

Elena Seranova (1:43)

Yeah, so I'm actually an interdisciplinary scientist and I guess that I always was really eager to learn and I sometimes call myself an information junkie because I really love absorbing new information. So I actually started my studies with psychology and I did my bachelor's degree in psychology, a bit of cognitive neuroscience there and then I realized that I'm really fascinated by the human brain. So I started studying neuroscience at first myself and then I found this really interesting master's degree in translational neuroscience, which is basically neuroscience and genetics.

And this is when I first got involved with wet lab biology research and I got fascinated by it again because I got to grow cells and do cool molecular biology experiments on them. And this is when I decided to continue my studies in this area and I did my PhD at the University of Birmingham in the UK in autophagy and stem cell biology, where I was studying different mechanisms related to neurodegeneration in stem cell derived models. And the main mechanism that I was studying was autophagy. And this eventually led me to studying other areas such as NAD biology and cell metabolism and so on.

Siim Land (3:09)

Yeah, there's a really popular all these topics like stem cells and NAD and autophagy. So you must be feeling like on top of the world in terms of choosing this right topic to pursue in your life.

Elena Seranova (3:24)

Well, autophagy is a very essential mechanism.

We will talk about it today in more depth. And it's very crucial for multiple cellular functions. And without it, cells literally cannot survive. And on top of that, autophagy is also related to NAD as well. And this is when I came across this popular subject such as NAD boosters. And this is why I started my current company as well, which is NMN Bio, which offers anti-aging supplements with focus on NAD boosters in particular.

Siim Land (4:01)

Yeah. So maybe we will start with what is autophagy and how does it work? So you have like some slides also that you prepared for us and you can just share the screen.

Elena Seranova (4:11)

Absolutely. I would be happy to do this. Let me just put this here. So just bear with me, please. So what is autophagy is the question of the day. And we will start by stating that autophagy is is basically a vital homoesthetic pathway, essential for cellular survival and human health. So what does this actually mean? We're going to talk about this in great detail today.

First, we will provide an overview of the autophagic mechanism. So it starts with the formation of the so called phagophore, which is a double membrane structure.

And what the phagophore does is that it involves different dysfunctional organelles and aggregate from proteins and other compartments of the cell that need to be digested because they're not serving the cell anymore. And this process can be triggered by multiple pathways. Some of them are mTOR dependent and some of them are mTOR independent. And there are some agents, some pharmacological agents, natural compounds that can activate all these pathways. For example, rapamycin is a hot topic right now, but it actually acts through mTOR.