[II-AHAJS-2] The challenge of developing mitochondrial nano medicine based on MITO-Porter Technology
In recent years, mitochondrial dysfunction has been implicated in a variety of diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, cancer and a variety of inherited mitochondrial diseases. This makes this organelle a promising therapeutic drug target, and mitochondrial therapy would be expected to be useful and productive for the treatment of the above diseases. To achieve such an innovative therapy, it will be necessary to deliver therapeutic agents to the interior of mitochondria in living cells. However, only a limited number of approaches are currently available for accomplishing this. We recently reported on the development of a MITO-Porter, a liposome-based carrier that can be used to introduce macromolecular cargos into mitochondria via membrane fusion (Y. Yamada et al, Biochim Biophys Acta 1778: 423-432 (2008), Y. Yamada et al, Adv. Drug. Deliv. Rev. (in press)). In this presentation, we discuss novel therapeutic strategies that involve the use of a mitochondrial drug delivery system (DDS) focusing on “cell therapy via mitochondrial activation”. Concerning the topic of cell therapy, we report findings to show that Cardiac progenitor cells activated by a MITO-Porter system (MITO cell) enhance the survival of a cardiomyopathy mouse model via the mitochondrial activation of a damaged myocardium (J. Abe et al, J Control Release 269: 177-188 (2018)).