Like so many families, we experienced firsthand the frustration of navigating complex health challenges without clear explanations or solutions. The deeper we looked, the more we were drawn to one fundamental question:
What powers human health?
Countdown began with a search for answers. What we found was energy.
A non-traditional nonprofit, building a movement around cellular energy — the science most overlooked and underfunded, and most fundamental to human health.
Mission & Vision
Our Vision
A world where cellular energy is recognized as a foundation of human health, transforming how we understand, prevent, and treat disease while improving resilience, performance, and health across the lifespan.
Our Mission
To accelerate mitochondrial science and medicine and bring cellular energy to the center of human health.
Guided by the belief that Energy Is Everything, we fund bold, high-risk, high-reward research, expand education, elevate public understanding, and bring together the scientists, clinicians, innovators, philanthropists, investors, and brands advancing the future of health.
We believe the greatest breakthroughs in health will come not from any one discipline, industry, or organization, but through collaboration. By connecting people, ideas, and discovery across traditionally separate fields, we are helping accelerate scientific progress, improve health across the lifespan, and shape a new era of health rooted in the science of energy.
I. The Question
Countdown began with a search for answers.
What we found was energy.
That question led us to mitochondria — the tiny organelles responsible for producing the energy that powers every cell in the body. We learned that mitochondrial dysfunction sits at the center of an extraordinary range of conditions, from rare genetic disorders and neurodegenerative disease to metabolic dysfunction, immune dysfunction, infertility, cognitive decline, and aging itself.
What surprised us most was not the science. It was how little attention, funding, and awareness this field received despite its potential to transform human health — a field filled with brilliant scientists, groundbreaking discoveries, and enormous promise, yet lacking the infrastructure to move faster. That realization became the foundation for Countdown.
II. Why Mitochondria
Beneath every function in the body is a single unifying force.
We live in a world where we wait for disease to appear, then scramble to manage it. A system built on reaction, not understanding. Treatment, not prevention. Symptoms, not cause.
But beneath every function in the human body is a single, unifying force: cellular energy. The kind that powers every thought, every movement, every signal, and every repair process. And at the center of that system are mitochondria.
Mitochondria do far more than produce energy. They help regulate cellular signaling, metabolism, hormone production, immune function, stress response, inflammation, adaptation, recovery, and the processes that influence health, performance, and aging.
Your brain depends on them to think. Your heart depends on them to beat. Your muscles depend on them to move. Your immune system depends on them to defend, repair, and recover. Mitochondria are not niche. They are not secondary. They are fundamental.
Mitochondrial dysfunction influences every organ system and impacts health at every stage of life — because every function in the human body depends on energy. Yet for decades, this field has remained underfunded, overlooked, and fragmented.
III. Why Now
Science, technology, and awareness are converging.
We can measure what we could not measure before. We can see what we could not see before. We can intervene earlier, more precisely, and more meaningfully.
The question is no longer whether mitochondria matter. It is how quickly we can translate this science into better health.
Countdown is the first organization dedicated to accelerating mitochondrial science and medicine across the full spectrum of human health while advancing awareness, education, collaboration, and real-world application of this science.
Countdown exists to accelerate that moment — to fund what others overlook, to bring together science, medicine, industry, and community, and to translate discovery into real-world impact.
IV. Why Countdown
Health is not the absence of illness.
It is the ability to create, sustain, and restore energy at the cellular level. This is bigger than any one disease. It is about how we understand health itself.
This is why mitochondria. This is why now. This is Countdown.
We are helping lead a new era of health — one rooted in the science of energy, and built around the systems that actually keep us well.
Founder's Story
Countdown was born from a lifetime of questions — a personal search across motherhood, medicine, and the rooms where no one was looking at the whole picture. This is Mitzi Solomon’s story, in her own words.
“ For years, I was told to think of these as separate stories. I believed they were chapters of the same one.”Read Our Founder's Story
