The story

In 2014 Daniel Kraus and Barbara Kahn at Harvard showed in Nature that knocking down NNMT in fat and liver protected mice from obesity, by keeping NAD+ and SAM high and raising energy use. At the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Stanley Watowich and Harshini Neelakantan then designed small molecules to block NNMT, and 5-Amino-1MQ stood out because it slips into cells. They published its fat-reversing effect in 2018, and in 2019 showed it revives aged muscle stem cells. Russian molecular biology work on the methionine cycle explains NNMT's other cost: every nicotinamide it methylates uses up a molecule of SAM, the body's main methyl donor.