Leigh syndrome – where are those mitochondria replacement therapies?

Dear Sir: I came across your blog after reading Stanley Bing’s recent article in Fortune Magazine. I will try to be brief.

I have a 4 year old son who was diagnosed 1.5 years ago with a form of Leigh’s disease; one of the most devastating forms of mitochondrial disease. While he is receiving care from some of the most experienced doctors in the area of mito disease, as you are probably aware the general approach is to prescribe a vitamin regimen and “keep him comfortable.” That is to say, there is no cure or treatment for the disease, and the few centers that are researching the disease are not close to finding one. Since the disease is degenerative, this is a hard pill to swallow.

I am writing to you in hopes that you can recommend doctors or research centers that are applying experimental techniques to treat the disease through systemic regmed, stem cell or other methods. If I wait for traditional medicine to find a treatment (and especially the FDA), I fear it may be too late for my son.

Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Best regards -

Joe Mileti [miletijoe][at][hotmail.com]

Dear Mr. Mileti,

thanks for your honest mail. The kind of organellar, mitochondrial therapy that would be needed in order to replace the

Thesis live: 1.1 Basic concepts: Let’s roll!

In the live thesis building blogxperiment I edit (digest, compile, write, rewrite, delete) my ongoing doctoral thesis in blog posts and put the parts together on thesis live. The title: The physiologic role of stem cells in tissues with different regenerative potential.

After the Introduction draft it’s time to actually start to fill in the text and that’s really the hard part. In the text I mix complete sentences, paragraphs (source code, object language) with fragmented metacomments (labeled as /draft, comments are here/) as a GTD technique. Used literature, links come after the text in a reference form like: Rando TA. Stem cells, ageing and the quest for immortality. Nature 2006;441:1080-1086. or Rando TA. (2006) Stem cells, ageing and the quest for immortality. Nature 441:1080-1086. (maybe I should check the official rules here)

Figures, diagrams will be included and I don’t promise to figure out brand new ones (but promise to find good ones), but that’s not a necessary job for thesis writers.

Expect me to start with a low quality (including older texts of mine) material and progress toward something more valuable.That is a trend people usually would like to follow throughout their professional careers.

1.1 Stem cells and regenerative medicine: basic concepts

Looking for the exact definition of stem cell is sometimes the source of endless semantical debates, but at least we do know two generally accepted criteria: stem cells are able to renew themselves and could differentiate into other type of cells. First, they are unspecialized, mitotic cells that renew themselves for any (i.e. long) periods through series of cell divisions, which result in similar unspecialized stem cells. This is the so called and overstated “immortality” characteristics.