The Mighty Mitochondria in Modern Medicine

In Biology class, Deerfield students learn about cell function and physiology, but we often don’t think about how it applies to the real world of health. As many of us have learned, there are seven main organelles in a human cell. The mitochondria is coined the “powerhouse of the cell” because of its responsibility for cell respiration, which converts the oxygen we breathe into energy for metabolic function. The human heart alone has 2 billion muscle cells packed with mitochondria. At Boston Children’s hospital, just a car-ride away from Deerfield, Dr. Ram Emani, a cardiothoracic surgeon and Dr. James McCully, a cardio researcher, are pioneering a way to use the body’s own mitochondria to help heal itself. The pair first met when the news of McCully’s work at Harvard made it to Dr. Emani. They decided that Dr. McCully would move to Boston Children’s so that they could work together on the research, and from that the technique was born.

It’s a simple procedure called mitochondrial transplantation. Dr. Emani and McCully have been taking mitochondria from healthy muscle from the neck of their patients and injecting it into injured heart muscle. They have identified that the procedure could aid patients who have suffered a heart attack or who have suffered a complication during open-heart surgery such as a kinked or blocked blood vessel. In both scenarios, blood flow is decreased to a portion of the heart, depriving it of oxygen. When patients suffer from one of these complications, they are often placed on an ECMO machine, which does the work of their heart and lungs, while their organs recover. It is often difficult for patients to come off of this machine because the oxygen deprivation weakens and damages the heart muscle cells. Dr. McCully first engineered the idea when examining images of damaged heart cells. He realized that the mitochondria in the cells had drastically changed in shape and color, rendering them less effective in respiration. The idea of mitochondrial transplantation is that the new mitochondria will jumpstart the cell respiration, aiding in the organ’s recovery and helping the patients off of the ECMO machine, allowing them to live a more normal life.

While Dr. Emani’s and Dr. McCully’s work was initially a preliminary test of the procedure’s efficacy on Emani’s infant patients, it inspired McCully to design an experiment to measure how effective it was on adult heart attack patients. He found that mitochondrial transplantation is in fact an effective treatment for a variety of ischemic (deprivation of blood) conditions. So why is this exciting for the scientific and medical communities? The answer is accessibility and efficiency. According to the CDC, 610,000 adults die each year in the United States from heart disease, making it the leading cause of death for both men and women. From his experiment, McCully gathered that the mitochondria needed (about 1 billion) could be extracted from the patient’s healthy muscle, purified, and ready for use within 30 minutes.

The idea that a treatment that has the potential to save that many lives can be so easily and quickly carried out is astonishing. As students, we sometimes don’t know how to connect the foundations that our classes give us to the complex experiments of Doctors today. However, Dr.’s Emani and McCullys’ revolutionary work in the treatment of cardiothoracic diseases shows us that each little piece of cell function that we learn in class is an integral piece of scientific discovery and can be applied to modern medical technique.