Two WSU professors unveil product aimed at reducing nicotine craving, limiting effects of carcinogens

Two professors from Washington State University have designed a dietary supplement meant to ease the addictive nature of nicotine and restrict the negative effects air pollutants have on the body.

Albert Li, an affiliate professor at WSU’s department of pharmaceutical sciences, said he was 10 years old when his grandfather died of a rare head and neck cancer. He remembers his granddad as a kind, mellow man who enjoyed puffing on the bit of a pipe. More recently, two of his cousins died of lung cancer just months after being diagnosed.

It left him devastated.

After years of researching drug-to-drug interactions and working diligently to develop numerous drugs throughout a storied career, Li came out of retirement with the goal of helping people to quit smoking.

Li sold his company, In Vitro ADMET Laboratories, to Discovery Life Sciences in 2021. With that money, he could have lived the rest of his days in Hawaii, he said. Instead he invested it into his new company, LiT Protect, which he described as a culmination of his life’s work.

The product he and Travis Denton, an associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences at WSU, created is an essential oil. It works by targeting an enzyme, known as CYP2A6, that breaks down nicotine.

“You take in nicotine and your body metabolizes nicotine right away,” Li said. “So instead of introducing new nicotine (like a pouch does), why don’t we slow down nicotine metabolism? So that’s our concept. That’s where my background in enzyme inhibition comes in.”

Nicotine, like all drugs, triggers the release of serotonin and dopamine in the brain. But the liver produces CYP2A6 to flush nicotine out of the body. Unfortunately, this comes with a range of unpleasant side effects.

“When you’re addicted to smoking, you don’t smoke again to get high again,” Denton said. “The withdrawal symptoms are coming on, and you want them to go away.”

The hope with LiT Protect is that it will inhibit, or slow down, metabolization in order to make a person want to smoke less. Li and Denton say their product is meant for more than just cigarette smokers, it could be suitable for anyone exposed to a certain class of molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. They believe their product is perfect for diesel mechanics, road and paving crews, industrial workers and wildland firefighters.

Anytime organic materials are burned, such as plants, fossil fuels or cigarettes, they produce polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Many of these compounds produce carcinogens when the body metabolizes them. LiT Protect, by inhibiting CYP2A6, is supposed to limit the production of those carcinogens in the body.

“Don’t forget when they’re smoking, it’s making it healthier to smoke because the smoke that’s going in there is not being activated by the body to become carcinogenic,” Denton said.

The two came up with the name LiT Protect by combining their names. “Li” for Albert Li and “T” for Travis.

“It was long enough ago when my kids were in the house and I could say ‘it’s lit’ and I could make them cringe,” Denton said.

The essential oil tincture they created is made from oils available for purchase in supplement stores. It’s best when mixed in with water or tea, regardless, the taste is still strong.

On the first swig, a profound smack of cinnamon clings to one’s taste buds. Li said they’re working with a manufacturer to turn LiT Protect into a gel capsule.

“I don’t want people to be turned off by the strong aroma,” Li said.

With six drops of LiT Protect in a 150-milliliter container, Li said they saw 100% inhibition of the enzyme responsible for nicotine metabolism. They chose 150 milliliters because that’s how much fluid human intestines can hold.

Li said he’s spent close to $300,000 bringing LiT Protect to life. Their next step is to assemble a group of at least 10 smokers, with the help of two WSU pharmaceutical science professors, Ayesha Ahmed and Kawkab Shishani, to see if the LiT Protect drastically reduces a person’s urge to smoke.

While Li has his own Wikipedia page with a list of accomplishments and his prior experience, he said LiT Protect is the one he’s most proud of.

In the first decade of Li’s professional career, he studied the genetic toxicity of environmental pollutants and how air pollutants can cause genetic damage.

In later decades, his research shifted to human drug metabolism and he pioneered a process that many companies still use to study human drug metabolism called the cryopreserve method.

“Before I came on, drug companies were using animals for testing,” he said. “Ninety percent of them failed in a clinical trial.”

By cryopreserving, or freezing, cells, tissues or organs, for an extended period of time, scientists can better study a drug’s effect.

“We really want to help with this health crisis of exposure to air pollutants, like smoking and forest fire, because right now there’s nothing out there to help,” Li said.

A bottle of LiT Protect on their website costs $40, Denton said. But if you go to one of the farmer’s markets where they sell their product, a bottle is $20.

Humans have used essential oils and aromatic plants for thousands of years, with the earliest record dating back 6,500 years ago. They’re a concentrated plant extract that offers solutions for sleep management, stress, anxiety, and now, maybe even nicotine addiction.

Jeffery Talbot, an associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Roseman University, and Tim Le, an associate professor of pharmacology at Touro University Nevada College of Osteopathic Medicine, spent two years independently purchasing, studying and investigating doTerra essential oils.

They attempted to synthetically build doTerra’s essential oils, but ultimately failed. In 2018, the pair presented their findings in front of 30,000 people at the doTerra annual global convention in Salt Lake City.

Le said the founders of LiT Protect clearly have strong scientific backgrounds and that the idea of targeting CYP2A6 is not inherently unreasonable.

“However, there is an important distinction between a scientifically plausible mechanism and a clinically validated health product,” Le said in an email.

Much of the reason that Li and Denton chose the essential oils approach is because it hardly requires any testing compared to prescription drugs.

Denton said if their essential oil was a pharmaceutical drug, it would take 20 years to get it through the FDA and cost them about $1 billion. And even if they managed to get it through testing, there’s a chance that another, larger corporation would swallow them.

“The key issue, therefore, is not whether a botanical mixture can modulate a CYP enzyme,” Le said. “The key issue is whether this specific product, at the marketed dose and route of use, has been shown in well-controlled human studies to produce the claimed biological and clinical effects without causing clinically meaningful safety concerns or drug interactions.”

Both Le and Talbot said they would like to see a scientific review process in the future before they could say one way or another how effective the LiT Protect is. This is something that Li and Denton are interested in doing and have already consulted with other scientists and consumers to review their product. The patent for the LiT Protect is pending.

“From a proprietary standpoint, they (Li and Denton) have an interest in wanting to protect that invention, that intellectual property, as they have a patent pending,” Talbot said. “And when approved, it will be exciting to learn what those substances are, how they’ve been combined or prepared in such a way to produce what one would assume would be effects that are beneficial to health and wellness.”