A Hypothesis and Theory paper entitled “Shortage of cellular ATP as a cause of diseases and strategies to enhance ATP”, written by StaGen staff-members Todd Johnson and Naoyuki Kamatani in collaboration with Emory University Neurology Professor Hyder Jinnah, was published in Frontiers in Pharmacology on Feb 20, 2019.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2019.00098/full

Research on modern medicine and biology has focused on things (molecules) and information (genes), but we consider the remaining frontier to be energy (ATP). Nick Lane’s book “The Vital Question: Why Is Life The Way It Is?” is receiving worldwide attention and describes how energy flow was the most important phenomenon during the evolution of life. In addition to mitochondrial disease, we believe that neurodegenerative diseases that occur in elderly people are caused by cellular energy deficiency, and thus, we are developing a new drug: ATP enhancer. ATP enhancer was effective for mitochondrial disease, but we think that it will also be effective for other diseases in aged people. In addition to the brain, tissues that requires large amounts of energy are muscle and heart. The proteins amyloid β, tau and α-synuclein that accumulate in the brains of Alzheimer and Parkinson’s diseases also accumulate in muscles of patients with inclusion body myositis, which occurs primarily in elderly people. That means that the accumulation of these substances could be surmised to be due to age-related cellular energy deficiency. Therefore, we expect that ATP enhancer will also be effective for muscle and heart diseases.