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Mitotherapy Breakthrough: Supercharging Your Cells ⚡️| Science Corner with David Friedberg

so mitochondria are the powerhouse of
the cell as Tim just told us educated us
right so every cell has hundreds of
mitochondria and mitochondria are what
are called organels they have their own
DNA in fact evolutionarily mitochondria
were bacteria that basically ended up in
the symbiotic relationship with what
became our cells so we each have
mitochondria hundreds of them in each
one of our cells each mitochondria has
its own nucleus and has its own DNA and
the mitochondria make the energy that
the rest of the cell uses that energy is
called ATP and it eats up glucose or it
eats up ketones if you're in ketosis and
it uses that to make the ATP so every
cell in our body gets its energy which
is what it uses to function from the
mitochondria and so there's been a lot
of research into the relationship
between mitochondria and aging and that
dysfunctional mitochondria as they start
to break down and stop working and have
damage may actually be a key driver for
many diseases that we experience as
humans including many cancers
Alzheimer's Parkinson's ALS features of
autism muscle tissues being weak etc so
as the cells get older and the
mitochondria stop working we make new
mitochondria but over time the DNA
degrades and the mitochondria become
less effective and there are fewer
functional mitochondria per cell the
cell stops working right and eventually
the organism stops working right have
you have you learned anything about the
connection of creatine to mitochondrial
health it's part of um some of the
processes but there's some separate
research on this but it's definitely
worth spending time on people are crazy
about hitting five grams or 10 grams of
becoming like a trend yeah I think it's
Oh yeah i know five grams yeah something
like that it's trending on Twitter i
think it's kind of like a meme or a joke
in addition to being I don't I don't
think it's a joke is it is it But it
does it is there any science that backs
that up or not really for mitochondria
there are questions on this like do you
want to focus on things that are
increasing biogenesis which is creation
of new mitochondria does that create a
better benefit on the creatine work i've
read some of these papers i actually
tried it for a while i personally had a
allergy to it which is kind of rare but
happens but anyway we can talk about it
further so so one of the key things was
um there were three papers that I wanted
to just highlight that kind of follow an
interesting theme the first one was from
2023 from WashU in St louis and this
paper Nick if you could just pull up
that image
of mitochondria being transferred these
folks identified and demonstrated that
mitochondria can actually transfer from
one cell to another so if you've got a
cell that's got damaged or dysfunctional
mitochondria they've identified three
mechanisms by which mitochondria can
move into a cell that needs more
mitochondria that are working and are
more functional that's something that's
been theorized for a long time people
have said "Oh well we think mitochondria
transfer." But there wasn't really
evidence of this so as of two years ago
these guys provided very good evidence
of mitochondria that we can now put into
cells if it's floating around it can
make its way into another cell and as a
result it can rejuvenate or provide
energy to a dysfunctional cell which
might improve dysfunctional tissue or
improve disease the second paper was
done um last month out of Columbia
University and this was the first
mapping of the mitochondria in the human
brain and so these folks created 703
tiny cubes of brain from a person that
passed away a 54 year old donor and then
they analyzed the mitochondria in each
of those cubes and they used that to
make a map of mitochondria in the brain
and what it showed was that different
parts of the brain different cells had
different amounts of mitochondria and
different mitochondrial function which
actually starts to highlight how that
difference in energy production in
different cells in different parts of
the brain may actually cause some of the
things like memory loss or speech
impairment or um as we age the fact that
we end up being you know kind of
forgetful or start to lose some of our
capacity that the mitochondrial
dysfunction in the brain might actually
be the key driver of that aging um
symptomology the third paper which just
came out came out of a team at Sha Jang
University in China so what these guys
did which was really incredible is they
took stem cells so stem cells that they
got out of human blood and they took
those stem cells and they figured out a
way to treat the stem cells that those
stem cells would start to make an excess
amount of mitochondria than they
normally would make in fact they were
able to get those stem cells to make
854 times the number of mitochondria
that those cells would normally make and
those mitochondria were on average 5.7
times more efficient at making energy
ATP so they created highly energetic
mitochondria and they made a lot of them
and the idea that we can put
mitochondria into our body or into
tissue in our body to heal it or repair
it has been something that folks have
been trying to do research around for a
long time but the limiting factor is
access to enough mitochondria so this
mechanism that they developed where they
could take stem cells make copies of the
stem cells make lots of mitochondria and
then they isolate that mitochondria and
use it as a therapeutic tool and they
did it in cartilage that was damaged and
they were able to heal that cartilage so
um this is a group that does bone and
and tissue repair studies but they
applied the mitochondria directly into
the area where there was damage to the
bone and the bone grew back and it
actually improved the healing in an
incredible way so this this opens up the
door to this whole new therapeutic
modality a new type of therapy called
midotherapy or mitochondrial therapy
that based on the series of papers that
we're seeing coming out recently I
believe could end up becoming a really
incredible um new therapy that may
ultimately lead to the treatment for
many diseases that we're kind of dealing
with right now so I just wanted to kind
of like this be uh immediately
applicable to say people with sports
injuries you know meniscus knees ankles
you start to think about those bones
spurs chips that basketball players
football players go through would that
this be like the lowhanging fruit for
this technology yeah i mean what they
did this in and I think this was
published in a research magazine called
Bone or something bone and tissue or
something
but they did I'll let my subscription
lapse i got to thank for reminding me
they did it in a in a model a mouse
model of osteoarthritis um and it
repaired this osteoarthritis but that's
exactly right and so that's tissue where
you can using a microscope you can
actually see the healing happening but
you could see this being applied for
example uh to cerebral spinal fluid
where you can basically increase the
mitochondrial the energetic
mitochondrial production uh that finds
its way into maybe neuronal cells into
neurons in your brain and improves um uh
your brain function or you could put it
into damaged hearts after heart attacks
and improve heart function so there's
all these theories about how you could
use mootherapy as this becomes possible
to now produce lots of mitochondria and
use it as a therapy that can then be
applied to lots of disease states so I I
I I think there's going to be a bit of a
blossoming of research in this area of
mitotherapy