I'm curious why David Sicnlair is then working on a drug that involves NMN. He could just as easily make one with NR. Keep in mind that what he is working on is a drug, not just trying to manufacture NMN cheaply if I've read that correctly.
I'm pretty sure everyone is misunderstanding some of Sinclair's and Wu's statements to the media and the unfortunate wording of an UNSW press release ("developing NMN into a drug substance.") I think that they are merely talking about turning NMN itself into a "drug," in the technical sense. Properly, a "drug" is simply any chemical that causes a therapeutic effect. Thus, any "supplement" that causes a therapeutic effect is a "drug." If you think about it, until relatively recently nearly all "drugs" were natural products — digitalis, morphine, quinine, reserpine, pilocarpine, lithium, ergot, atropine, etc, etc — and scientists and doctors would routinely speak of "herbal drugs" and "mineral drugs."
The notion that a "drug" is by definition an artificial (and preferably patentable) chemical entity and thus wholly distinct from a "dietary supplement" is the product of the public's superstitions around things being "natural," compounded by the early supplement wars of the 1970s leading into the "Proxmire Amendment" and effectively enshrined in US law by DSHEA, both of which (the naturalist fallacy and the legal defense) provide strong incentives for the supplement industry to rigorously insist on the distinction. (Of course, they then want to sneak around it: being forbidden to make "drug" claims, and required to affix the disclaimer "not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease", they then try to make wording that has the form of a structure-function claim but winks at a drug claim).
Thus, when Sinclair says
Human trials of NMN therapy will begin within six months.
"This is the closest we are to a safe and effective anti-ageing drug that's perhaps only three to five years away from being on the market if the trials go well," says Sinclair, who maintains a lab at UNSW in Sydney.
... he's talking about NMN being licensed as a drug. This is made explicit in an answer given by Wu to questions about the UNSW press release from the Australian public broadcaster:
Q: Why is it realistic to claim that this drug will be on the market in “three to five years”, as has been widely reported in the media and in the UNSW press release?
Wu: We’re about to start a clinical trial, which will focus on safety only. This is the first step in the drug development pathway. Depending on whether this is an accelerated or standard approval pathway, this is the time taken to reach the end of phase III clinical trials ... The figure shown in that link is for what is called a “new chemical entity”, which is a molecule that is completely new to science and for which there is no data on what it can do to the human body. The molecule we are using is not a new chemical entity, it is a metabolite that is present inside every cell in the body.
As to all the speculation about why Sinclair keeps using NMN instead of NR (and is not doing comparisons with NR): the question, of course, could just as easily be turned around to ask why all the people doing studies with NR only aren't doing comparison studies with NMN — or why both aren't doing comparisons with nicotinic acid or niacinamide. Let's remember that the nicotinic acid elevated NAD+ as well as NR in muscle and did a better job in liver according to Canto et al, contrary to Brenner; let's also remember that nicotinamide has been reported to have many of the effects reported for NR, such as against animal models of diabetic obesity and Alzheimer's.
I strongly suspect that the main reasons for most researchers are (a) that they have an existing and often free supply of one agent vs. the other, and (b) it just costs a lot of time and money to do an extra group of mice with a different agent (including the extra time and money to prepare the dosed chow, in oral studies). Science funding is at present miserably, pathetically hard to come by (and the proposed NIH budget cut is a threat to our ability to conquer aging), and you have researchers routinely trying to stick to their miserly budgets by doing studies in way too few mice as it is: the notion that they should increase their numbers by 50% to indulge our curiosity is understandable, but in current circumstances suicidal. (But if you want science done right, push for an expansion of the NIH budget (or your national equivalent), and for goodness' sake, donate to SENS Foundation).
Edited by Michael, 26 April 2017 - 11:34 PM.
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