$30,000 award backs research that improves donor organ assessment and shows how redox biology edging closer to real-world longevity medicine.
This week, Finnish biotech NADMED named Cleveland Clinic as the inaugural recipient of its $30,000 NADMED Award, backing a project led by Dr Keyue Sun and the Schlegel Lab on metabolic assessment of organ viability in transplantation [1]. In practice, it is a story about where longevity science is quietly becoming more useful, more clinical and more grounded in the realities of patient care.
Beneath the technicalities lies a simple, deeply human question: when a donated organ is under stress, how can doctors tell whether it still has enough life left in it?
Transplant medicine is often described in heroic terms and fairly so. A donated organ can mean more years, more birthdays, more time. However, between donation and transplantation sits a fragile window where that future is uncertain.
Once an organ is removed, it begins a race against biology. Blood flow stops. Oxygen drops. Cells switch into survival mode. Even when an organ is cooled or connected to a machine that helps preserve it, clinicians still have to make a hard call: is this organ viable enough to transplant or is the damage already too great?
That decision is not always clear-cut. In a field where supply is already painfully limited, uncertainty can be costly. A bad call can harm a patient; a cautious one can mean a potentially usable organ is never transplanted at all. That is exactly the problem the Cleveland Clinic’s awarded project is trying to solve.
The winning research investigates metabolic organ quality during ischemia, the period when blood supply is reduced or cut off, and looks at how different machine perfusion strategies affect that organ while it is being preserved.
Think of an organ like a phone running on a low battery after being unplugged. It may still look fine from the outside. The screen might turn on, but what you really want to know is whether the battery can still hold a charge, whether the system is stable and whether it can keep functioning once you need it most.
That is where NAD and NADH come in. These molecules help cells manage energy. In effect, they are part of the internal circuitry that tells you whether a tissue is still metabolically alive and able to recover. If the organ’s energy systems are failing, that often points to mitochondrial dysfunction, a major driver of transplant complications.
The work matters. It is about determining whether an organ still has sufficient metabolic resilience to survive the handoff from donor to recipient.
If this sounds familiar to longevity readers, it should. Mitochondria, the tiny structures inside cells that help generate energy, are central characters in both transplantation and aging biology. When they falter, tissues become less efficient, recovery slows and damage can cascade. That is true after a transplant, and it is also true in the long arc of aging, where declining mitochondrial function is linked to frailty, chronic disease and reduced resilience.
In that sense, this is another example of a broader shift in medicine: away from static snapshots and toward dynamic measurements of biological function.
Longevity science has talked for years about “biological age”, “cellular health” and “metabolic fitness.” But for the field to mature, those ideas need to move beyond slogans and supplements. They need to become tools clinicians can use in real decisions. A transplant suite is about as real as it gets.
Sun expressed gratitude for NADMED’s support, noting that it enables the team to broaden their organ viability testing. He explained that their research is moving beyond assessing mitochondrial complex I injury through flavin mononucleotide (FMN) to evaluating complex I function itself, both of which are essential drivers of ischemia–reperfusion injury and vital factors in determining successful transplant outcomes [2].
The team wants to move from simply spotting damage to understanding whether the organ’s energy machinery is still functioning. In medicine, that is a meaningful difference.
Professor Andrea Schlegel put it plainly: “I believe this grant, and the collaboration with NADMED, are highly relevant for advancing the field of transplantation by strengthening the mechanistic understanding of mitochondrial injury and improving viability assessment.”
The jury’s reasoning proved quite revealing, as they noted that the winning proposal distinguished itself through a robust scientific foundation, clinical relevance and significant translational potential. They further observed that the project’s method for identifying NAD/NADH patterns for organ assessment demonstrates a clear capacity to enhance decision-making in transplantation.
It only means that there is no shortage of interest in NAD biology, especially in longevity circles. However, much of that interest has often lived in a fog of enthusiasm. What makes this story different is that it is rooted in a very practical use case. A clinician needs to know whether an organ is likely to recover. A patient’s outcome may depend on it. That is where redox biology starts to feel less like a trend and more like infrastructure.
If longevity is going to grow as a field, it will need diagnostics that can guide decisions in the clinic, not just conversations at conferences. This award does not solve that problem overnight, but it points in the right direction: toward a future where measuring cellular energy and resilience is not an aspirational idea, but a part of everyday medicine.
Photograph courtesy of NADMED
[1] https://www.nadmed.com/the-first-30000-nadmed-award-to-cleveland-clinic/
[2] https://www.pharmiweb.com/press-release/2026-04-01/world-leading-nad-experts-select-cleveland-clinic-research-on-organ-preservation-as-inaugural-30-000-nadmed-award-winner
