Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains spermidine, a polyamine that activates autophagy, the cellular recycling process that won Yoshinori Ohsumi the 2016 Nobel Prize. Despite being safe and well-studied, spermidine's ability to trigger this renewal process was only recently understood.
. But then I began to look into the research. Now spermidine belongs to, as you know, a class of compounds called polyamines, and they have been studied for years. There's something like 13,000 in the literature about polyamines. They include things including the delightfully named spermine and putrescine. Yeah. Putrescine, right? They're just terrible names. But they're very safe. Nobody really understood their magic mojo until we learned that spermidine activated autophagy, the cell renewal process that was the subject of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine that was awarded to Professor Yoshinori Ohsumi of Tokyo Tech. And all of a sudden we began to realize actually spermidine can do some amazing things.
