Transplanting healthy mitochondria directly into damaged sensory nerve cells dramatically reduced chronic pain in rodent models, a proof-of-concept study published in Nature Neuroscience has found — raising hopes for an entirely new class of drug-free pain treatment that could help millions of people for whom existing medications provide inadequate relief.
Chronic pain affects an estimated 20% of adults worldwide and costs more than $600 billion annually in the United States alone in direct medical costs and lost productivity. Current treatments, including opioids and anticonvulsants, carry serious side effects and often provide only partial relief, with no curative option available for most chronic pain conditions.
Why Mitochondria?
Mitochondria play a crucial role in maintaining the electrical excitability of neurons. When mitochondria in pain-sensing neurons become dysfunctional — as happens in many chronic pain conditions including diabetic neuropathy, chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, and fibromyalgia — those neurons become hyperexcitable, firing pain signals continuously even without any injury to explain them.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University extracted healthy mitochondria from donor cells and injected them into dorsal root ganglia, the clusters of sensory neurons that relay signals from the body to the spinal cord. The transferred mitochondria integrated into their recipient cells within 72 hours. Animals treated this way showed a 70% reduction in pain-related behaviors within two weeks, with effects lasting the full three-month observation period and no immune rejection observed.