The idea of transplanting mitochondria sounds like something a decade away from a hospital. It is not. Cardiac surgeons at Boston Children's Hospital have been injecting mitochondria harvested from a child's own skeletal muscle into damaged heart tissue since a first-in-human application was reported in 2017.
The results from that program are striking and small. Sixteen children have undergone autologous mitochondrial transplantation for ischemia-reperfusion injury after cardiac surgery. Eighty percent came off extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, compared with a historical rate of about 40 percent, according to the hospital's own account.
