Mitochondria are the energy factory of every cell in our bodies. Malfunctioning or mutated mitochondria are at the root of a wide range of ailments.

A novel technique under development in Israel, mitochondrial augmentation therapy (MAT), is being tested on children with rare, untreatable mitochondrial diseases.

Minovia Therapeutics is the brainchild of founder and CEO Natalie Yivgi-Ohana, a biochemist and embryologist who says she “fell in love with mitochondria” during her doctoral and postdoc studies.

“There’s a theory that mitochondria used to be bacteria that entered the developing cell about one and a half billion years ago and became a part of the cell, using the oxygen and nutrients we take in to produce an energy ‘coin’ called ATP that enables everything in the cell to happen,” she tells ISRAEL21c.

“I started the company 11 years ago to see if we could isolate young, healthy mitochondria from one type of cell and try to put them into a diseased or aged cell. Will they enter and integrate with the cell’s own mitochondria and produce fresh energy for that cell?”

After three years of experimentation, Yivgi-Ohana shifted to the mitochondria augmentation approach.

“This is a cell therapy that takes diseased hematopoietic stem cells — immature blood cells — from patients, enriches them with healthy mitochondria, and injects them back into the patient.”