Consumers practically need a graduate degree in biohacking to crack the codes of the longevity business today.
The first course to obtain that degree would perhaps be focused on NAD+, which has become almost the ABC of longevity lingo. Less well known as nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, it’s a coenzyme found in every cell of the body critical for cellular energy. Because of its centrality to bodily functions, biohackers have been on the hunt for ways to keep NAD+ levels up as we age. That hunt has led to nicotinamide mononucleotide or NMN, another three-letter player in the longevity discourse. NMN is a precursor to NAD+, meaning it helps drive NAD+ production.
Baran Dilaver would be a great fit to teach the graduate school-level biohacking class on NMN. With co-founders Andrew Salzman, M.D. and branding specialist Patricia Ryan, he launched San Francisco-based supplement brand Wonderfeel in 2022 with patented $88 Youngr NMN supplement. The next year, the company introduced $58 NMN Capsuls. Youngr NMN combines 900 milligrams of NMN with ingredients such as ergothioneine, trans-resveratrol and vitamin D3 with the goal of improving overall well-being.
A serial entrepreneur and veteran cannabis executive, Dilaver was CMO of CBD ingredient producer Mile High Labs when it raised $38 million in 2018, the largest series A round in cannabis industry at the time, and COO and CMO of Firefly, a vape company acquired by Slang Worldwide in 2019. It took $1 million to bring Wonderfeel to market, and today the brand counts biohacking guru Mark Hyman, functional doctor and medical director of The UltraWellness Center, as a fan.
Beauty Independent sat down with Dilaver to discuss the benefits of NMN, why the United States Food and Drug Administration tried to ban the ingredient, how Wonderfeel is getting into women’s health and whether the brand is fundraising.
You call yourself an outsider in the nutraceuticals industry, so you brought on Salzman to develop Wonderfeel’s products. What’s his background?
He’s a medical doctor from Harvard who ran divisions at the Columbia University Hospital for a long time. He raised over $170 million in NIH grants. One of his biggest discoveries was inventing something called a PARP inhibitor that fixes the broken BRCA gene, the broken DNA that causes ovarian cancer and breast cancer in women.
That is super relevant to what we do because, while he was doing that, he was investigating cell health and cell functions. NAD and NAD precursors is his area of expertise. We come from very much a pharmaceutical background and approach into nutraceuticals. We do a tremendous amount of research.
How does Youngr NMN work?
It’s an NAD precursor that has five ingredients. Two or three of them are not super well known, and some of them like vitamin D is obviously very well known. The formula is designed because of the synergistic effects of the different ingredients.
NAD was discovered about 100 years ago, but it’s so important to the body. Your body produces it every minute. Without NAD, you’ll be dead in 10 seconds. It takes place in over 300 enzymatic processes. Seventy percent of it goes into energy production. All your organs need NAD to function optimally.
The problem is, as you start getting older, NAD production starts slowing down. By the time you get to age 50, your body might be producing sometimes half as much as NAD. The real discovery is not to inject NAD, that doesn’t necessarily work because NAD doesn’t get inside the cell.
The discovery is that our body also produces these nucleotides, NMN, that turns into NAD. That research is very new, only in the last three, four years, we started really understanding the amazing benefits of NMN, and it’s now exploding because there are so many benefits bringing the NAD levels back up to your youth levels.
What are some of the benefits?
The way it manifests itself in your body is really wide. Your organs start functioning better. When it comes to skin and haircare, some benefits are very basic visual cues. Women in their 40s, 50s, they start losing their eyebrows and their eyelashes, for instance. After consistent use, we hear feedback about eyelashes growing back, people’s hair and nails start growing back thicker.
As far as the skin goes, when people are healthier, they just look better. If you’re healthier, happier, your skin glows. Skin elasticity gets better because it helps skin to rejuvenate faster. Organs function better and your skin is the largest organ. If your organs are working better with more NAD, it’s more likely that your skin will rejuvenate and repair itself faster.
Another ingredient in there is called ergothioneine. It is prevalent in mother’s milk. Babies have receptors for it. We don’t know why, but clearly there’s a benefit. And somebody who’s 89 years old with Alzheimer’s and dementia, they benefit tremendously if they consume it and it collects in the body for up to 30 days when there’s tissue damage. It also works great against sun damage.
We do clinical trials and our studies show that when we combine NMN with ergothioneine, inflammation levels go down dramatically, almost the same as steroids. So they become very powerful whenever there is damage. Day by day, we hear different benefits from our customers as well. This week we heard that a customer who were suffering from digestion issues and it worked really well for them.
How long do people have to take Wonderfeel before they start seeing results?
It’s such a wide range because the benefits are so different. People who have runner’s knees, their knee pain goes away after one day because it hits inflammation so quickly, but most people don’t have that issue. The main benefits take a long time because of the decline of NAD levels takes a long time—it’s been declining for 20, 25 years.
So, getting the NAD levels back up doesn’t immediately get your organs back up to speed. Everybody is different. [To help with] eczema, it takes eight, nine months. The eyebrows and eyelashes, they don’t just grow overnight. People feel better energy in 10 days to 15 days. Sleeping better took almost two months.
How does Wonderfeel support women’s health?
Ovarian health is probably the least studied area when it comes to health. It turns out to have the most effect on women’s health. There’s a drug correlation of, if you have early menopause, you die younger.
I’m not out there trying to make the big claim that we’ve done a lot of research on ovarian health, how it works, but we started working with ovarian health experts. They confirmed our preliminary findings. It goes back into cellular health, the organs working better.
The FDA tried to ban NMN recently. Why?
The FDA came out with a controversial letter saying NMN should be a pharmaceutical. They muddied the waters with NMN because a company applied for a pharmaceutical application because it has so many benefits. But, again, it’s something natural that your body creates. It has no side effects.
So, it’s been on the market and the FDA later said, “We’re looking into it.” It’ll be a real offense to the public if the FDA takes it out of the nutraceutical market and makes it a pharmaceutical where it becomes super expensive for a few small amount of medical conditions.
What the FDA is doing is something like saying vitamin D now is going to be a pharmaceutical. We’re going to take it off the market even though people that have been using and benefiting from vitamin D. That’s why [the NMN ban] is not going to happen. We have an article explaining exactly what happened and what we think is going to happen moving forward.
Where is Wonderfeel sold currently?
Mostly our website. We’ve done a few pilot runs with some doctors [selling it in their offices], and they love it. It started with Dr. Mark Hyman. In his clinic, they were looking for NAD precursors. They looked around the market and liked ours the best. They were our first customer, literally. He became a big fan. He takes it, he supports it, he talks about it.
We have a few other doctors’ clinics, health clinics and IV providers. They realize that giving NMN as a daily NAD precursor is much more efficient [than injecting NAD]. We have about 15 to 20 of these clinics and health centers.
The press is really good to us. Whenever they review NAD precursors, we usually get ranked as the best one or one of the top ones. They recognize that we do a lot of clinical research ourselves, but also we also do a lot of research understanding what’s out there and how it relates to our fields.
Do you have retail aspirations for the brand?
I definitely see us in Target, Walmart, Whole Foods, GNC. All big mass merchandisers, for sure.
Has Wonderfeel raised funding?
We didn’t need to. I come from Silicon Valley. [I understand] investments, partnerships. We will raise money only from strategic investors. If there’s a strategic investor in a new market like Japan or they have a great retail network, that makes perfect sense. We’re definitely open, and we have everything ready for an investment. We just don’t need it.
What are your bigger plans for Wonderfeel?
This is something everybody and their mothers need to use. The more you can delay age-related decline, the better you are, though we’re not sure if this is going to make you live much longer. It’s too early to make those claims.
Then, the specializations. That’s where we see fascinating potential. Ovarian health, perimenopause, post-menopause, fertility. The science is new, so clinical trials are going to take another few years until we see the results, but all the pre-clinical trials have been very successful.
This patented combination does wonders for eczema. Eczema is a skin autoimmune disease that is very difficult to treat, and people use hardcore steroids. That is a specific area where we will develop the product further or package it differently. Dementia and Alzheimer’s, it’s helping with cognition and protecting the brain. That’s a completely different market.
We need to make more specialized formulas. For instance, for women’s health and fertility, we can make a few tweaks to make it specific for those purposes. It’s not just NMN that does the wonders, it’s the formulation. Sometimes, it’s not improving the formula, it’s about changing the messaging.
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