The history of Quinone therapy

A century-long trail of discovery.

Today one can buy CoQ10 (“Ubiquinone”) over the counter. The Co stands for coenzyme, the Q for quinone, and the ten because, unlike some animals (8) and fish (6), human ubiquinone has a ten unit isoprenoid tail to help its membrane stability. CoQ10’s powerful protective effects for the heart were discovered in the 1950s by a Dr K. Folkers, who reasoned that no one ever had cancer of the heart. He found 5 times as much ubiquinone in heart muscle, where it assisted in electron transport and thereby was indispensable for energy synthesis. The discovery led to thousands being saved from cardiac disasters. But almost forty years before then, Professor William Koch in Detroit had found that higher redox potential quinones could assist in a variety of animal disorders, from hoofand mouth to distemper and hog cholera. His ideas were, however, disregarded by the medical establishment of the day, despite several spectacular animal studies and many thousands of effective treatments on patients in the Detroit area. Similar ideas of Nobel laureate Szent-Gyorgyi about the value of quinones, led a Hungarian team in the 1990s to revive quinone treatment, who found it also adjuvant in metastasis. Their published research embraced cellular, live animal and human studies. A recent BMJ article reported their successful clinical trial with parabenzoquinone on colorectal cancer patients (Jakab, Schoenfeld et al., 2003) where its use as an adjuvant significantly inhibited metastasis.