Mitochondrial and NAD+ therapy in China
Two completely different things are sold under the word “mitochondrial”, and only one of them is what a longevity programme means. Here is which one we run, what the human trials actually found, and where the honest limit of it sits.
The short answer
The mitochondrial and NAD+ protocols delivered in the Boao Lecheng pilot zone in Hainan are a course, not an injection: NAD+ precursors, mitochondrial cofactors and metabolic conditioning, prescribed from your fasting blood panel and delivered across a four-day stay, with hyperbaric oxygen running alongside as the cellular-energy axis of the retreat. On this island the protocol is offered as Mito Energy, and it is one of the three regenerative programmes included in the retreat rather than an add-on invoiced afterwards.
It is a non-cell programme. That single fact decides almost everything a traveller wants to know: what you can have, whether you need a diagnosis, how quickly it can start, and how much regulatory scaffolding stands behind it. It is also the reason this page is not the stem-cell page.
Two different things are called mitochondrial therapy
This is where most searches go wrong, and it is worth thirty seconds before anything else.
| What is meant | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| Primary mitochondrial disease | Inherited disorders of the mitochondrial or nuclear genome — MELAS, Leigh syndrome, mitochondrial myopathies and their relatives. Diagnosed genetically, managed by specialist neurologists and metabolic physicians, largely supportive, and an active area of trials. This is hospital medicine for a named disease. |
| Age-related mitochondrial decline | The gradual loss of mitochondrial number, quality and output that accompanies ageing in otherwise healthy people. Addressed with supportive protocols: NAD+ precursors, cofactors, metabolic conditioning, oxygen and exercise. This is longevity medicine, and it is what a retreat offers. |
They share a word and nothing else. A programme that offers the second while implying it addresses the first is making a claim no one has earned. We run the second. If you or a family member has a diagnosed primary mitochondrial disorder, the right destination is a metabolic-medicine centre, and nothing on this page is an alternative to one.
What the biology actually says
Mitochondrial dysfunction is one of the recognised hallmarks of ageing — it appears in the hallmarks framework first published by López-Otín and colleagues in 2013 and revised in 2023, alongside genomic instability, telomere attrition and cellular senescence. That is a statement about what reliably changes with age, not a statement that reversing the change reverses ageing. The distinction is the whole argument in this field.
The NAD+ story sits inside it. NAD+ is a coenzyme every cell uses to move electrons through metabolism, and it is also the substrate consumed by the sirtuin and PARP enzymes involved in repair and regulation. Tissue NAD+ has been reported to decline with age across a range of human and animal tissues, with the magnitude varying considerably by tissue and by measurement method. The inference many companies then draw — that restoring NAD+ restores the function that declined with it — is plausible, is being tested, and is not established.
NAD+ precursors: what the trials have and have not shown
The two precursors with genuine human data are nicotinamide riboside (NR) and nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN). Both have been through randomised, placebo-controlled trials, and the finding that replicates is pharmacological: they raise measurable NAD+ in blood, at the doses studied, and are well tolerated. That much is not in dispute.
What has not followed is consistent clinical benefit. Trials in healthy adults, older adults and various metabolic populations have returned small, mixed and frequently null results on functional endpoints — insulin sensitivity, muscle function, aerobic capacity, fatigue. Some trials report a signal; others, similarly designed, do not. Sample sizes are usually modest and follow-up short.
Intravenous NAD+ is a different proposition again and is studied considerably less than the oral precursors. It is also the form most aggressively marketed to travellers, typically at speed, and fast infusion is what produces the flushing, nausea and chest tightness people describe. A slower, monitored, panel-dosed course is a different clinical object from a drip in a hotel room, even when the molecule on the label is the same.
Hyperbaric oxygen, and the study everyone quotes
Hyperbaric oxygen sits in the retreat as the cellular-energy axis: the island runs a hyperbaric oxygen suite built on 26-year-old Japanese civilian chamber technology, and it is scheduled for mitochondrial ATP production rather than as a wound-healing indication.
The study that put HBOT into the longevity conversation is Hachmo and colleagues, published in Aging in 2020: thirty-five healthy adults aged 64 and over, sixty sessions across three months, with reported telomere lengthening in peripheral blood immune cells and a reduction in senescent cell fractions. It is a real result and it is worth knowing about. It is also small, uncontrolled — no placebo arm — measured on surrogate endpoints rather than health outcomes, and not since replicated at scale. Cite it as a reason the question is open, not as an answer to it. Hyperbaric oxygen also has genuine contraindications, which is why it is scheduled by a physician after your screen rather than booked like a sauna.
What is actually delivered here
The protocol is dosed from data rather than from a menu. Your fasting panel is drawn on the screening day, read by the specialist panel, and the course is written from it — NAD+ precursors, mitochondrial cofactors and metabolic conditioning delivered across the stay. It runs in the hospital’s day-treatment unit and in the wellness houses, not in a hotel suite, and it sits inside the wider assessment rather than beside it. What happens on a longevity retreat, day by day →
Around it, on the same non-cell side of the wall, sit the other infusion and blood protocols the zone’s hospitals run: therapeutic plasma exchange by double-filtration apheresis, 1+X functional infusion medicine, whole-body immune hyperthermia, and the oxygen and blood-optimisation suites. These are session-based. There is no manufacturing run behind any of them, which is why their cost tracks sessions and monitoring rather than a batch. Therapeutic plasma exchange in China, and what the evidence actually supports →
The cellular-energy work in the wellness programme runs alongside: hyperbaric oxygen, full-body red light paired with dry hydrotherapy, bio-electric repair and an anti-inflammatory nutrition course you take home. The six-axis system, and what a medical health retreat in Hainan includes →
Why this is not cell therapy, and what that changes
Cell and gene therapy in mainland China is governed by State Council Order No. 818, in force since 1 May 2026: it is medicine, for disease, in licensed institutions, against filed indications, with a hospital panel deciding candidacy and the power to decline you. Order 818 and what the zone licenses →
Mitochondrial and NAD+ protocols are not cell products and do not travel on that route. Three consequences follow, and two of them cut against us.
Who it suits, and who should not bother
It suits someone who is coming for the assessment anyway, wants the energy course built from their own panel rather than from a supplement aisle, and can hold the result loosely. It suits someone who wants the protocol supervised, sequenced and documented rather than improvised.
It does not suit someone looking for a defined outcome on a timetable, someone who wants a biological-age number to quote afterwards, or someone hoping this substitutes for a diagnosis they already have and have not acted on. And it is emphatically not the answer for primary mitochondrial disease.
It is also not the strongest thing on the island. If your screen turns up something treatable, the licensed programmes are the part that is genuinely hard to obtain anywhere else, and the panel will say so. Is stem cell therapy safe? →
What it costs
Mito Energy is one of three regenerative programmes included in the four-day, three-night retreat — offered from about $2,700 all-in, with the precision screen, the specialist reading, the villa, the meals, the transfers and twelve months of follow-up inside the same figure. You choose one of the three; it is not billed on top. Comparable Alpine longevity programmes publish at roughly $39,000–115,000 for a week.
We do not publish prices for the licensed treatment programmes, and the reasoning is set out in full on the costs page — briefly, none of them is sold from a menu, and a quote that exists before anyone has read your results is telling you something about the seller. What a longevity program in China costs, and what is included →
Seven questions to ask any NAD+ or mitochondrial clinic
Frequently asked
What is mitochondrial therapy?
Mitochondrial therapy is not one treatment. The phrase covers two unrelated things. In hospital medicine it means the management of primary mitochondrial disease — inherited disorders of the mitochondrial or nuclear genome, diagnosed genetically and treated by specialist neurologists and metabolic physicians. In longevity medicine it means a set of supportive protocols aimed at age-related decline in mitochondrial function in otherwise healthy people: NAD+ precursors, mitochondrial cofactors, metabolic conditioning and oxygen work. The second is what a wellness programme offers. It is not a treatment for the first, and a programme that blurs the two should be treated with suspicion.
Is NAD+ therapy available in China?
Yes. NAD+ and mitochondrial support protocols are delivered as part of the infusion and non-cell longevity programmes at the partner hospitals in the Boao Lecheng pilot zone in Hainan, alongside therapeutic plasma exchange, functional infusion medicine, hyperbaric oxygen and whole-body hyperthermia. Unlike cell therapy, these are session-based protocols with no manufacturing run behind them, and they are not restricted to a filed disease indication.
Does NAD+ therapy work?
It depends entirely on what you mean by work. Oral NAD+ precursors — nicotinamide riboside and nicotinamide mononucleotide — have been through multiple randomised placebo-controlled human trials, and they reliably do the thing they are designed to do: raise measurable NAD+ in blood, at studied doses, with good tolerability. What has not followed consistently is clinical benefit. Trials in healthy and older adults have returned small, mixed and often null results on functional endpoints. Intravenous NAD+ is studied far less than the oral precursors. Anyone who tells you the question is settled is ahead of the literature in whichever direction suits them.
Is mitochondrial or NAD+ therapy the same as stem cell therapy?
No, and the distinction is the most practically important thing on this page. Cell and gene therapy in China is medicine for disease under State Council Order No. 818, in force since 1 May 2026: it is delivered in licensed institutions against filed indications, and a hospital panel decides candidacy. Mitochondrial and NAD+ protocols are not cell products. They carry no cell-therapy restriction, no manufacturing run, no candidacy panel in that sense — and correspondingly, none of the regulatory scaffolding that makes a licensed cell programme auditable.
Can I have mitochondrial or NAD+ therapy for longevity rather than a diagnosed condition?
Yes. This is the practical difference between the two halves of the programme menu. Licensed cell therapy is currently delivered only for therapeutic purpose — it proceeds where the assessment finds a treatable condition, or where you arrive holding a diagnosis or prescription from your own physician. The non-cell longevity protocols, including the mitochondrial and NAD+ course, carry no such restriction and are available to well guests as part of the retreat.
How much does mitochondrial or NAD+ therapy in China cost?
The mitochondrial protocol — offered as Mito Energy — is one of the three regenerative programmes included in the four-day retreat, which is offered from about $2,700 all-in; you choose one of the three, and it is not invoiced on top. Anything beyond the retreat’s own inclusions is quoted by the hospital that would deliver it, in writing, before you commit. We do not publish a price list for the treatment programmes, and the reason is on the costs page.
Write to us →Tell us where you’re starting from — a care manager replies within one working day.Or download the Retreat Dossier (PDF) → — itinerary, inclusions, programs, practicalities.