NAD+ (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) is one of the most important biomolecules in your body. It's involved in the conversion of food to energy, maintaining DNA integrity and ensuring proper cell function. Together, these functions help protect against or delay aging and disease. As explained by Conlon:

"NAD is actually something I ended up working on in the drug development industry. I was fortunate enough to work for a company that was forward thinking. It actually started looking at developing molecules that would improve our health span, which is the proportion of the life that we live in good health.

So, rather than just focusing on individual diseases, we were actually looking at underlying mechanisms of cellular aging and looking at slowing cellular aging to improve healthy lifespan.

This is when I came across NAD, which is an incredibly important molecule in the body. Going back to molecular biology roots, NAD is important for two critical things in the body.

The first is energy production. The process that takes the energy out of the food we eat and converts it into ATP, which is the form of energy currency that our cells can use to survive and do all the functions that they need to do, absolutely requires NAD.

Without it, we simply wouldn't be alive because our bodies wouldn't be able to make any energy. It's estimated that if we didn't have any NAD in our body, we'd literally be dead in 30 seconds, which shows how critical it is to our cells.

The second thing that it's really important for is cellular maintenance and repair. NAD almost acts as a sensor in the body. It enables the cell to react to changes in energetic stress, which is basically how much energy or lack of energy the cell has … These are the two major things that NAD is known for, and because of these roles, it's absolutely fundamental to overall cellular health."