EPO and Friedreich ataxia: The initial attention toward considering EPO for FRDA came from the observation that recombinant human erythropoietin (rhuEpo) can promote frataxin increase in neuronal and cardiac cells and in PBMCs (Sturm et al., 2005) and fibroblast derived from FRDA patients, through a mechanism that does not involve an increase in frataxin mRNA transcription (Acquaviva et al., 2008).