Indigophoton
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Very interesting use of mitochondria - as transplants to replace damaged versions in human organs.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/health/mitochondria-transplant-heart-attack.html
An unusual transplant may revive tissues thought to be hopelessly damaged, including the heart and brain.
Kate Bowen with her infant, Georgia, in the intensive care unit at Boston Children's Hospital. Doctors tried to revive the baby's heart with an infusion of one billion mitochondria.
When Georgia Bowen was born by emergency cesarean on May 18, she took a breath, threw her arms in the air, cried twice, and went into cardiac arrest.
The baby had had a heart attack, most likely while she was still in the womb. Her heart was profoundly damaged; a large portion of the muscle was dead, or nearly so, leading to the cardiac arrest.
Doctors kept her alive with a cumbersome machine that did the work of her heart and lungs. The physicians moved her from Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was born, to Boston Children’s Hospital and decided to try an experimental procedure that had never before been attempted in a human being following a heart attack.
They would take a billion mitochondria — the energy factories found in every cell in the body — from a small plug of Georgia’s healthy abdominal muscle and infuse them into the injured muscle of her heart.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/health/mitochondria-transplant-heart-attack.html