Mitochondrial supplements damage stem cells
JohnDoe999
12 Jun 2015
Does anyone know specifically which supplements one is talking about:
Kalliste
13 Jun 2015
Its been covered in some thread here already. MitoQ was mentioned specifically, the tox was at high dosages. MitoQ's competitor Skulachev has made some public complaints saying that MitoQ has a small window between being an antioxidant and being a prooxidant.
They also tried NAC but that seemed to be less problematic.
This might be one of those "we drowned some cells in vitro in a megadose of substance X and look what happened".
niner
13 Jun 2015
This might be one of those "we drowned some cells in vitro in a megadose of substance X and look what happened".
That's the usual story. However, the apoptotic dose in vitro was only 50 nM. I don't know how long the cells were in contact with it, but a 10mg dose of MitoQ is 1.47e-5 m, which would make about 300 liters of 50nM solution. You can't just say "Wow, there's less than 300 liters of water in the body! We're doomed!" because pharmacokinetics doesn't work that way. There are various clearance routes and multiple depots that could absorb and segregate the drug, so you have to figure out how much would actually get into the stem cells in vitro. However, it's a significant cause for concern. Not just with MitoQ, but until demonstrated otherwise, with all mitochondrial antioxidants, which would include c60oo. I really hope the group that raised this concern is looking at more antioxidants at a wider range of concentrations. SS-31 / Bendavia is in clinical trials for everything under the sun as we speak. They are really looking to make it an approved drug, so they are going to have to convince the FDA that it's not frying stem cells. From this paper, we see that different stem cells have different susceptibilities, and it's very likely that different antioxidants will have different therapeutic windows.
