In science, it is important to keep an open mind.
This was Dr. Herbert Nagasawa’s philosophy that enabled him and his fellow scientists and researchers to develop the amazing compound RiboCeine. Earlier this year, Dr. Nagasawa and his son Dr. Scott Nagasawa hosted a special symposium that detailed their personal history with RiboCeine. On a quest to solve a serious problem, faced with numerous challenges and setbacks, Dr. Nagasawa and his team applied hard work, creative thinking, and good science to arrive at this amazing breakthrough. This is his story.
For Dr. Herb Nagasawa it starts with how, after the Vietnam War, he saw that a high percentage of returning veterans were addicted to drugs and alcohol. Due to the controversy and unpopularity of the war, the veterans did not receive a glorious welcome and were ignored or shunned by most of society. Dr. Nagasawa’s own brother was one of the soldiers who suffered this fate. In response to this problem the Veteran’s Administration decided it needed better, more effective drugs than Antabuse to prevent alcohol abuse. They decided that they needed more new drugs that prevented alcoholics from developing fatty livers, which would lead to cirrhosis and eventually a liver transplant or death.
Because of his personal connections to this tragedy, Dr. Nagasawa took up the call to help these brave veterans. Ultimately, the question he was faced with was, could his medical research team find a way to interrupt the metabolizing process of alcohol by trapping acetaldehyde (AcH) and diverting the product to urinary excretion?
Through a series of initial research studies, his team found that the compound MTCA provided an effective means of delivering the amino acid cysteine. Since alcoholics have lower levels of glutathione (GSH), they postulated that using MTCA as a bioavailable delivery agent for cysteine could stimulate the body’s development of glutathione and protect the liver from the oxidative stress of chronic alcoholism.
One of Dr. Nagasawa’s medical student, Rick Zera, volunteered to test this through a preliminary experiment. Because liver damage through alcohol consumption takes a long time to develop, they chose to test on an analogous liver problem. An overdose of Acetaminophen (ACP), the active analgesic agent in many over the counter cold and flu medicines, produces liver and kidney damage similar to the effects of cirrhosis.
The results were very promising, as they showed that L-MTCA could have very similar results to NAC, the current “gold standard” for treating ACP overdose. From this experiment the team applied for a grant for further testing. However, a major critique of the grant proposal was that, while MTCA protects against hepatotoxicity, it also delivers the toxic compound acetaldehyde. Though that amount was very miniscule, the grant was denied.
Appreciating this denial as part of the rigorous nature of peer review, Dr. Nagasawa knew he had to keep an open mind while moving forward.
The team knew they needed compounds that were non-toxic to combine with cysteine in order to effectively deliver it to the cell. They realized that we do have such compounds in our own body, namely aldose monosaccharide, or the simple sugars produced when glucose is metabolized.
To test this possibility, graduate student Jeanette Roberts prepared the sugar-cysteine condensation produced from 8 different aldose saccharides. The next experiment showed that livers that had an overdose of ACP plus the saccharide D-ribose combined with cysteine had 100% survival rate from the in vivo experiments, while the next best compound, glucose-cysteine did not perform nearly as well.
Eureka! Ribose-Cysteine protected the liver form a toxic dose of ACP. Ribose-Cysteine serves as an effective delivery method of bringing L-cysteine to cells, stimulates glutathione biosynthesis and protects them from toxins. The ribose-cysteine compound also makes for an ideal dietary supplement since it’s made from endogenous elements already in our body.
Further experiments went on to show that ribose-cysteine was even more effective than NAC in increasing glutathione content within a liver cell.
From these experiments, Dr. Nagasawa and his team know that Cellgevity, thanks to its RiboCeine technology, stands as being truly unique. Other glutathione enhancing products do not have the scientific or chemical background that created and tested RiboCeine to solve the problem of effectively delivering cysteine to the body’s cell.
Today, we have several products that effectively make use of this breakthrough health supplement. Now, not only do you know some of the science and history behind RiboCeine, but you know about the dedication and ingenuity that made it all possible.
Opeongo High School is hosting a fundraiser in support of one of their students, Austin May in Grade nine. Austin and his family moved to the Douglas area three years ago and during that time Austin became ill. He is a graduate of Cobden Public School.