“Disease does not wait. Neither can we. The future of health will be defined by those willing to lead it, and the time to lead is now.”

Mitzi Solomon, President and Co-Founder

Our Challenge

A hidden Crisis: Mitochondrial dysfunction sits at the center of a wide range of diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, cancer, and more. It touches every family, yet remains one of the most overlooked and underfunded areas of medicine. 

The body isn’t a silo: For decades, medicine has advanced organ by organ, disease by disease, yet beneath and upstream from every system is what powers it all: cellular energy, driven by the trillions of mitochondria within our cells. 

The funding gap: Nonprofit foundations contribute billions to U.S. medical research each year, yet mitochondrial and cellular energy science has historically received less than 1% of that funding. 

Our Approach

From siloed to connected: When mitochondrial function declines, the effects can ripple across multiple systems, contributing to fatigue, brain fog, inflammation, accelerated aging, and many of the most pressing diseases of our time.

Because this dysfunction begins at the level of cellular energy — upstream from where symptoms appear — it often goes undetected by standard medical testing, which currently lacks the ability to measure mitochondrial health. By accelerating mitochondrial research, we have the opportunity to transform medicine itself, shifting from reacting to disease after it appears to detecting, preventing, and treating dysfunction at its source.

Research Pillars

Countdown invests across six research pillars that span the full arc of mitochondrial science: understanding how cellular energy shapes health, detecting dysfunction before disease takes hold, and advancing the treatments of tomorrow.