Niagen Bioscience, Inc. Common Stock LD Micro 20th Annual Main Event Conference

Thank you, Chris. Of course, we love this conference and love Chris, and intend to keep coming back here. We love meeting everybody here, and very appreciative of Chris, and are very proud of the success that he's shown, and hope that it continues. Quick show of hands, how many people here in the room know what NAD is? Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. Yeah, I actually took that before.

Well, you're, like, 21? It makes you very healthy, right? NAD stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. It's a coenzyme that exists in all living cells, plant and animal, and is vital to all important metabolic processes inside the cell, but especially energy metabolism and the repair of cell damage. There are these organelles inside of cells called mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, as we all recall.

Mitochondria take the oxygen from air and the nutrients from food and convert it into ATP, adenosine triphosphate, which is basically molecules that carry energy throughout the rest of the cell. The process by which mitochondria do that is called the Krebs cycle or the citric acid cycle, and if you looked at an image of the citric acid cycle, you would see that NAD or some form of the NAD metabolome exists in every step of the way. When you have a lot of NAD, you have more mitochondria and you have more efficient mitochondria. In essence, you have more energy, better energy metabolism, when you have a lot of NAD. But perhaps a more important function of NAD is cell repair. I do not know. Cell repair. The cell has a multitude of different types of damage. There is oxidative stress, there is inflammation, there is gene mutations and damages.

There is the presence of a virus. Sometimes there is actual physical damage to the cell, but the cell has mechanisms in place for repairing that damage. The repair of damage mechanisms are related to NAD. When your cell is saturated in NAD, it has a greater ability to repair damage, reduce inflammation, correct oxidative stress, correct gene damage. What is aging? Okay, I am sorry. There is no direct relationship between the images and what I am saying. I will just riff. Aging is the accumulation of damage at the cellular level, but also the diminished ability to repair that damage. So when you see wrinkled skin or when you see inflammation or you see joint pain or you see memory lapses, these age-related conditions that we all live with, or even worse, diseases that are related to aging, all they are is cellular damage, but the inability to repair that damage.

Elevating NAD improves the cell's ability to repair the damage. So it goes to show that if you keep your NAD levels high, there is almost no age-related condition that we cannot improve. Indeed, we have done many studies at this company. Every age-related disease or condition that we have identified is also associated with a decline in NAD. Every one. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, arthritis, simple memory loss. What is this company? This company has identified a series of molecules that very, very safely and very, very efficiently elevate NAD. Very effectively, very efficiently, very safely elevate NAD, and it does so in the more damaged cells. One of these ingredients is called nicotinamide riboside. We call it Niagen. Nicotinamide riboside. It is a magical, incredible molecule. It is actually found in trace amounts in milk. That is where it is found in nature. It is actually in the liquid that mom passes through to the baby.

It is very much the liquid of life. We have shown that it elevates NAD extremely quickly, extremely safely, and extremely efficiently. So we built our company around that idea. Yes, we do sell a dietary supplement, and I see there is lots of boxes out there of our dietary supplement, Tru Niagen. But we do not view ourselves as a dietary supplement company. We view ourselves as an NAD platform company, an R&D company, if you will, that is committed to learning as much about NAD, how to measure it, how to increase it, what is the best modality, what are the best conditions, which cell types work best, which molecules work best for different conditions. Then we have developed an ability to commercialize it in numerous verticals, not just dietary supplements. Yesterday, we launched a skin topical product. But before we launched it, we did two studies.

Well, Estée Lauder did one of the studies, and another third party did the second study. But what we proved is that a topical version of nicotinamide riboside, what we call Niagen, penetrates the skin, gets into the skin cells, elevates NAD in the skin cells. Actually goes past that and actually gets into the bloodstream. Estée Lauder proved that it actually does so better than niacinamide, which is considered one of the more popular ingredients in the skincare business. But what I'm saying is, if you take Niagen topically, and we now have a product that you can do that with, it's not about hydrating the skin so it looks a little plumper for three hours. It's actually repairing the cell damage, and that's what aging is. It's the accumulation of damage at the cellular level. You may have heard of something called NMN.

The way NR works, Niagen works, and one of our patents identifies that when a cell is under metabolic stress, it actually opens up a pathway, and that pathway is actually looking, searching for NR, or nicotinamide riboside, or Niagen. That Niagen enters the cell and converts quickly into NMN, and then converts into NAD. So some companies are saying, "Well, why not just buy NMN?" Because NMN does not have the ability to enter the cell. NMN is not bioavailable unto itself. It has to convert into something else. And what it converts into in the bloodstream is NR. So when you're buying NMN, you're buying a precursor to NR. There's another issue with NMN that we're concerned about, is that there's an enzyme called CD38, which is associated with inflammation and damaged old cells. NMN's a substrate for CD38, whereas NR consumes, depletes CD38.

So the long-term health benefits are also safer and clearer with NR. This is our scientific advisory board. It's the best NAD anti-aging researchers in the world. Roger has a Nobel Prize. Rudy is the head of neurology at Harvard and probably the world's leading expert on Alzheimer's. Charlie Brenner actually discovered nicotinamide riboside when he was at Dartmouth. Hassie Cohen is the world's leading authority on peptides. He actually was the discoverer of MOTS-c. That particular peptide, we think, is in some way related to NAD. NAD is not a peptide. Bruce German is the world's leading authority on milk, and as I said, it is found in milk. We've actually shown that when moms take Tru Niagen, they actually produce more milk.

And when they pass through the Niagen to the babies, the babies actually have larger brains and are physically larger and healthier because they have these elevated NAD levels. Bruni Felding is one of the world's leading researchers at Scripps Research Center on Cancer, because there are people who have written articles and are concerned, "If I take Tru Niagen, am I increasing my cancer risk?" Because cancer cells have NAD, too. So are you promoting the growth of cancer? And Bruni has shown no, that's not the case, because there are many, many more anti-cancer properties. You're strengthening your immune cells and your killer cells.

Then, of course, Will Bohr, who is the grandson of Niels Bohr, and who just stepped down as the head of National Institute on Aging at the NIH, world leading authority in aging, but in particular, and something I am going to talk about momentarily, which we think is the core of our company, these rare orphan diseases where children age so rapidly that they die of old age in their teens. This is an area of expertise for Will Bohr. It turns out that these kids have non-detectable levels of NAD. Think about that. This is a cohort group of humans where you can see the direct relationship between NAD levels and the way the body ages. These kids have non-detectable levels of NAD, and they age so rapidly, they die of old age in their teens.