MitoWorld.org and MITOS Global have announced a new partnership with Heureka Labs, an AI-driven discovery platform with roots at Duke University, aimed at fundamentally expanding the analytical and discovery capacity of the global mitochondrial research community.

The collaboration brings together MitoWorld’s role as an organizing and convening force in mitochondrial science with Heureka’s advanced agentic research infrastructure, designed to support hypothesis generation, multi-omic analysis, and translational insight at scale.

“The mitochondrial research community has extraordinary biological insight, but it has largely lacked access to modern, integrated computational discovery systems,” said Gordon Freedman, Founder and President of the National Laboratory for Education Transformation (NLET), the nonprofit organization that operates MitoWorld and MITOS Global. “This partnership gives mitochondrial researchers discovery, analysis, and hypothesis-generation capabilities that have not previously existed in this field.”

Addressing Fragmentation in Mitochondrial Science

Mitochondria sit at the center of energy production, cellular signaling, metabolism, immunity, aging, and disease. Yet mitochondrial research remains highly fragmented across institutions, disease areas, and data silos. MitoWorld and MITOS Global were created specifically to address this fragmentation, building shared infrastructure for collaboration, translation, and synthesis across the field.

The addition of Heureka Labs introduces a powerful computational layer to that mission.

“This partnership represents exactly the kind of transformative collaboration we envisioned when building the Heureka platform,” said Dr. Matthew Hirschey, Professor at Duke University, Director of the Duke Center for Computational Thinking, and co-founder of Heureka Labs. “By combining MitoWorld’s deep domain expertise in mitochondrial research with our advanced computational capabilities, we’re not just organizing existing knowledge. We’re creating a powerful engine for scientific discovery that can accelerate breakthrough research in this emerging field.”

Augmenting, Not Replacing, Experimental Science

Through the partnership, MITOS Global researchers will gain access to Heureka’s agent-based research environment, which integrates scientific literature, biological databases, and computational analysis into a unified workflow. The platform is designed to augment and catalyze existing scientific processes—allowing researchers to explore complex hypothesis spaces, test data-driven connections, and identify promising directions before committing time and resources in the laboratory.

The partners emphasize that experimental science remains central to discovery. Computational exploration is used to guide, refine, and strengthen laboratory investigation and not substitute for it.

Heureka Labs has already been adopted by biotechnology companies, universities, and research institutes across the United States, Europe, and Asia. The MITOS Global partnership represents a focused application of this platform to one of the most biologically and clinically significant domains in modern science.

This builds on parallel efforts that leveraged Heureka’s data models to successfully uncover unexpected interactions across genes and pathways, leading to recently published discoveries relating to cancer research.

What This Means for Researchers

For mitochondrial researchers, the partnership provides access to consolidated multi-omic datasets, automated and reproducible bioinformatics workflows, and same-day analytical capabilities that previously required weeks or months of effort. The platform supports tasks ranging from transcriptomic and metabolomic analysis to pathway mapping, target prioritization, and biological interpretation, all within a unified research environment.

Importantly, the system is designed to serve laboratories with varying levels of computational expertise. Advanced users can directly engage with analytical pipelines and annotated code, and labs with limited bioinformatics capacity can interact through guided workflows and plain-language prompts. This flexibility reduces dependence on external contract research organizations and overburdened core facilities, lowering costs while expanding access to high-quality computational analysis.

Beyond efficiency gains, the partnership enables a qualitative shift in how mitochondrial research is conducted. By centralizing data in the MITOS environment and enabling real-time insight sharing across institutions, the platform supports collective learning rather than isolated discovery. As new findings are generated within MITOS Global projects, they enrich a growing knowledge base that strengthens future analyses and uncovers previously hidden biological relationships.

Heureka’s platform also supports downstream translational activities, including grant development, manuscript drafting, and review preparation, ensuring that insights generated through computational exploration can be efficiently communicated and validated. This integrated approach improves research quality while reducing administrative and analytical bottlenecks.

Initial Joint Project: A Mitochondria-Cancer Atlas

As part of the partnership, MitoWorld.org and Heureka Labs also announced an initial early-stage project to develop a Mitochondria-Cancer Atlas. This effort is designed to catalog the diverse ways cancers adapt, reprogram, and exchange mitochondria to support tumor growth, survival, and therapeutic resistance. The project will apply advanced computational analysis to one of cancer biology’s most complex and rapidly expanding frontiers: mitochondrial plasticity in cancer, with the goal of sharing insights across the broader mitochondrial and medical communities.

“Cancer provides the best living laboratory for the range of behaviors and manipulations that can happen to mitochondria in a living context,” said Alexander Sercel, PhD, MitoWorld’s Director of Scientific Affairs. “Cataloging these in a comprehensive way should lead to deeper levels of understanding of the basic science of mitochondria.”

Partnership Structure

The primary agreement for this partnership is between Heureka Labs and the National Laboratory for Education Transformation (NLET), the parent nonprofit organization that operates both MitoWorld and MITOS Global.

Information: Heureka Labs

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