
Dying Organs Restored to Life in Novel Experiments - ThomPete
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/health/mitochondria-transplant-heart-attack.html
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T-A
It occurs to me that mitochondrial decline also seems to be an important
aspect of aging. If you can just infuse mitochondria through the blood and
"the organelles will gravitate almost magically to the injured cells that need
them and take up residence", that suggests a rather obvious rejuvenation
approach.

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tambourine_man
But where do we get those new mitochondria from? I'm almost afraid to ask.

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nine_k
Maybe from cloning one's own cells, then carefully dismantling them to free up
mitochondria without damaging them? I don't think a lot of the tissue should
be required (that is, ounces, not pounds).

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aldoushuxley001
mitachondria are living organelles, they could simply be induced to replicate
until the desired quantity is reached.

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tomjen3
If I recall bio from school, they are super adapted to living in animal cells
-- they probably couldn't survive on their own.

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aldoushuxley001
It's true that they very much rely on a nuclear genome, because some of their
genes required for independent replciation have been lost. But surely there's
a framework that enables the mass replication of mitochondria using our own
cells as a source material.

I doubt blood would work because red blood cells contain effectively very
minimal, if not zero, mitochondria (depending on stage of cycle).

Funny enough, the best bet might be taking mitochondria from sperm or egg.
Human sperm have ~50-75 mitochondria per cell. There's on average 50 million
sperm cells per ml of ejaculant and the average is 2.5ml per ejaculation, so
125 million mitochondria could potentially be harvested from an average guy in
a single go, provided the extraction is an unrealistic 100% efficiency.

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bjelkeman-again
50 million/ml x 2.5 ml x 50 = 6.25 billion, is what I get the number to be.

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aldoushuxley001
Ah yes, I totally botched the math. Thanks for that.

So 6.25 billion potentially harvestable mitochondria per average sperm
donation.

Hard to say how much might be needed for a rejuvination test, but those seem
like viable numbers.

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jhou2
A brief search shows that mitochondrial transplantation for myocardial
infarction was described in 2008. Astonishing work. This is starting to become
more mainstream in the last couple of years.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18978192](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18978192)

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cromwellian
Wait, how do the mitochondria get back into the cells? Presumably the cell
membrane somehow permits them to pass but how are they recognized? If a
mechanism exists to recognize and permit them to move into a cell, doesn’t
that either suggest they can move out of cells as well and/or confirm the
theory that mitochondria were symbiotes? That is, there’s something in cell
DNA that encodes a mechanism for foreign symbiotes to cross the cell membrane?

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88e282102ae2e5b
I was also surprised by this. In the papers where they did this work, they
discuss many previously-known mechanisms for intercellular mitochondrial
transfer - apparently cells can form nanotubes and exchange organelles, and
that's relatively well-studied. That's not what's happening here, though, and
they state that the mechanism at play is unknown.

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empath75
It would be hard to convince me to sign up for such a study, if there’s a 50%
chance they give me a placebo and I die.

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Engineering-MD
In clinical trials, pure placebos are very rarely used (only in mild
conditions or where no treatment exists). Commonly novel therapies are
compared against the current treatment of choice.

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michaelscott
I was about to ask how ethical it could be to give a pure placebo in cases as
serious as heart failure, when simply telling the patient (or the patient's
family) that they received some other more conventional procedure should
produce similar results.

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nine_k
I think this is never done. I suppose both groups receive two therapies, one
of them being the best available therapy for the condition, and the other
either the new therapy, or a placebo.

This requires new and old therapies to be compatible, though.

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ceejayoz
Studies will also be suspended if it becomes clear that one treatment is so
obviously better as to be unethical to continue with the other.

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dhimes
It!!!

Could!!!

Work!!!!!!

(Apologies to Mel Brooks/Young Frankenstein)

