In 1969, Dr. Joe McCord and Dr. Irwin Fridovich initiated the field of free radical biology and medicine with the discovery of the enzyme superoxide dismutase (SOD) – a discovery that continues to fuel the work of Pathways Bioscience today.
Free radicals are molecules with an unpaired electron (think of it as a broken bond), which makes them extremely unstable and reactive. The fact that living cells could produce free radicals was a surprise, and the fact that they possessed an enzyme to efficiently scavenge and detoxify these free radicals was even more surprising. McCord and Fridovich went on to prove that this enzyme was essential for organisms to survive in the presence of oxygen.
This discovery of SOD propelled a multitude of related discoveries in laboratories around the world and the terms “oxidative stress,” “free-radical biology” and “antioxidant enzymes” became commonplace in the scientific literature. Soon scientists had discovered an important player that orchestrates the cell’s defenses against oxidative stress – a gene-regulating protein called Nrf2 that senses the level of oxidative stress in the cell and controls the expression of the genes, which produce not only the SODs but also of hundreds of other genes that need to be continually adjusted to provide optimal protection from oxidative stress.
McCord and colleagues published in 2006 a study showing that certain plant-produced dietary components could increase the production of antioxidant enzymes and decrease the evidence of oxidative stress in human subjects. A year later they found that these dietary compounds were acting via the activation of the “master regulator” of antioxidant enzymes, Nrf2.
In 2014, McCord and three of his colleagues founded Pathways Bioscience with the goal of obtaining an optimally balanced combination of plant-derived compounds, each of which can contribute to the proper regulation of Nrf2, but by using a variety of metabolic pathways. To illustrate the complexity of the task they recently published a peer-reviewed paper describing more than 40 distinct ways that Nrf2, the conductor of the orchestra, can be modified to control the performance. Modulating the Nrf2 pathways with carefully selected plant-derived compounds that act both individually and synergistically on different control points forms the basis of Pathways’s Nrf2.0® technology.
The Pathways Bioscience team continues its work through innovative research and development to improve the understanding and implementation of the science behind PB125®. They invite you to stay tuned!
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