Healing heart damage in newborns through mitochondrial implants

The new technology is developed by doctors at Boston Children's Hospital, promising to provide a healthy, normal life for many heart-damaged babies.

Illustration.Source: Futurism.

But that is not synonymous with the new heart transplant for patients, but instead the doctors will implant the mitochondria - taken from the muscle cells themselves - into their injured heart. This experimental process, which has obtained very remarkable results - according to the New York Times.

Each cell of the body contains a mitochondria - a specialized small structure, which provides the energy needed for cellular activities. If the cell loses the supply of oxygen-rich blood, its mitochondria will die, along with the rest of it, so it will die. The cardiac arrest (for whatever reason), or due to surgery to treat malformations, is also very easy to damage the mitochondria of the heart cells. Even if survived, the cells will be very weak, leading to the heart's inability to function normally.

Full recovery ability?

Through their studies, James McCully, a cardiologist in adults - has discovered, if extracting mitochondria from the abdominal muscle cells in pigs, then transplants them into cells. The heart is damaged (but not yet dead), the heart's ability to recover. Therefore, since 2015, McCully has partnered with Dr. Sitaram Emani - a specialist in pediatric cardiac surgery at Children's Hospital Boston - to test mitochondrial implants for [newborn] patients. heart damage. McCully extracted up to 1 billion mitochondria from a child's abdominal muscles, then implanted them on the most severely damaged heart, and as a result it took only two days for the baby's heart to beat normally like many babies. Other healthy births.

So far, the team has tested mitochondrial transplantation on a total of 11 babies, 8 of whom are making very good progress - according to the New York Times. While the mortality rate in children who also have a heart attack without transplantation is very high, even up to 65%. For the remaining 35% of survivors, there have not been any cases of heart function recovery recorded, and about a third are still on the waiting list for transplantation. So, if mitochondrial transplantation is proven to be really effective, it may help save lives and improve the lives of many children who have no choice.

Still, it will be difficult to find enough patients for clinical trials using this new technique. So scientists plan to replace them with adult patients - needing bypass surgery or replacing artificial heart valves. Annetine Gelijns, a biomedical statistics specialist at the Mount Sinai Medical Center (New YorK), said the first test could be carried out in 2019. So soon we will know for sure. Whether mitochondrial transplantation is really a cure in treating heart damage.