#311 NAD in Aging and Should You Take NAD Boosters - Dr Nichola Conlon

Nichola Conlon (0:00)

Aging is something that is malleable and something that isn't a sort of one-way street. I think it's really important that we start doing that now, because the science is actually quite far ahead of what people's perceptions of aging actually is.

Siim Land (0:17)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast, I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Nichola Conlon. Nichola is a molecular biologist and NAD specialist. She's also the founder of Nuchido. This episode is brought to you by BluBlox, my favorite light and sleep optimization companies. Artificial light at night exposure is associated with diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's. BluBlox provides the highest quality blue blocking glasses that filter out the specific wavelengths that have been shown to suppress melatonin in studies. Melatonin is more than the sleep hormone, it's also vital for longevity, anti-aging and immunity.

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Siim Land (1:30)

Nicola, welcome to the show.

Nichola Conlon (1:31)

Hi Sam, thank you so much for inviting me on.

Siim Land (1:35)

Yeah, I actually heard first about you on another podcast about Dr. Mercola, which was very very interesting episode. And we also got introduced by a common friend, Tim Gray. So it was good to, you know, have you on the podcast and yeah talk about what your research is about because you also like recently published an interesting article or yeah like a, a short article about what you're doing.

I'm very excited about it. I'm very excited about it. I'm very excited about it. I'm very excited about it.

I'm very excited about it. I'm very excited about it.

Nichola Conlon (2:12)

So my background is I actually did a PhD in looking at the bioavailability of drugs and nutrients and how they're absorbed in the gut and by the cells. And that led me into actually having a career in drug development.

So I worked in early stage drug development. That's the part where you actually identify in the targets that you're going to try and hit with different drugs. And I was really fortunate that I worked for a company that was quite pioneering in developing new drug discovery techniques. And I specialized in something called systems pharmacology, which is rather than conventional drug discovery, which just looks at a single target and tries to stick a single molecule to it. It's a way of looking at multiple targets and how do we target multiple things in one go with either one molecule sticking to multiple things or multiple molecules sticking to multiple targets. And you tend to find that you have a higher rate of success when you do that.

And in my job doing that, I was actually in charge of running the aging project. So looking for molecules that would actually slow down our rate of cellular aging and improve our health span. And at that point, when I was brought on to look after that project, that's when I became first interested in NAD. And that's when I first discovered it.

Siim Land (3:42)

How many years ago was that? Because NAD itself has become very popular in the aging and longevity space, maybe for the past four years or something like that. But when did you start to get into that?

Nichola Conlon (3:55)

Back in 2014

So this was really when the world of sort of longevity research had had some really big breakthroughs, not only in the world of NAD, but also in areas such as senescence and epigenetic reprogramming, where there were some really big breakthroughs that were demonstrating really for the first time that you could actually reverse cellular aging or biological aging. And that was kind of a watershed within the drug development world, because all of these companies had sort of been sitting on the edge, like thinking, well, should we should we dip our toe in it? Should we have a go or not? And when all of these studies came out, that demonstrated you could slow biological aging. That's when companies like the one I worked for decided, right, we're going to get in here and we're going to start looking at molecules that can actually do this. So this was actually quite early on when I got into the field of aging research.