A number of studies have reported that decreased mitochondrial numbers are linked with neoplastic transformation and/or tumor progression, including resistance to apoptosis. Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator-1 alpha (PGC-1a) is a multi-functional transcriptional coactivator that regulates the activities of multiple nuclear receptors and transcriptional factors involved in mitochondrial biogenesis. In this study, we observed that the number of mitochondria in sarcoma tissues, such as osteosarcoma and malignant fibrous histiocytoma, is significantly lower than that in normal muscle tissue or benign tumors, and that increasing the number of mitochondria by PGC-1a overexpression induces mitochondrial apoptosis in human sarcoma cell lines. The findings suggest that decreased mitochondrial numbers may contribute to musculoskeletal tumor progression, and that regulation of mitochondrial numbers by PGC-1a could be a potent therapeutic tool for human malignancies.M usculoskeletal malignancies are clinically aggressive and have high metastatic behavior in various organs. Although many chemotherapeutic protocols are used for human sarcomas, the current chemotherapeutic strategies for high-grade sarcomas have been ineffective, and the prognoses of patients can be extremely poor because of local recurrence and distant metastases 1 . Therefore, new therapeutic strategies against high-grade sarcomas need to be established. We have previously reported several therapeutic strategies against high-grade sarcomas [2][3][4] . Mitochondria are cytoplasmic organelles that play essential roles in cellular energy metabolism and programmed cell death 5 . Although the majority of mitochondrial proteins are synthesized by nuclear DNA (nDNA), mitochondria possess their own genome, called mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) 6 . Thousands of mitochondria are found in each cell, and the number of mitochondria per cell is known to vary with cell or tissue origin, and to change under different internal or external microenvironments, such as hypoxia, and stimulation by steroid hormones 7,8 . Quantitative changes in mitochondrial numbers have been observed in many cancers as a decrease in hepatocellular carcinoma, renal cell carcinoma, advanced gastric cancer and breast cancer [9][10][11][12][13][14] , or an increase in head and neck cancers, ovarian cancer, and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma [15][16][17]