Effects of Chinese patent medicine for activating blood circulation on cardiac repair after myocardial infarction / 中国临床药理学与治疗学

Myocardial infarction (MI) is a cardiovascular disease with high morbidity and mortality, which seriously endangers human health. Poor ways of repair after MI may damage people's life quality, therefore scientists have been committed to exploring the way of myocardial repair after MI to strive for a better prognosis of these patients. Chinese patent medicines for blood circulation activation have a long history of use in treatment of MI, where they have been shown to attenuate myocardial injury after MI and promote cardiac repair with multiple targets, links and pathways. This review focuses on a few representative Chinese patent medicines for MI and summarizes their pharmacological effects and clinical research in cardiac repair following MI, effectively providing scientific foundation on treating MI with Chinese patent medicines.

Cardioprotective Effects of Wharton Jelly Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cell Transplantation in a Rodent Model of Myocardial Injury

BACKGROUND: Whartons jelly-derived mesenchymal stem cells are a valuable alternative source that possess multipotent properties, easy to obtain and available in large scale compared to BMMSCs. We investigated the possibility of cardiac function improvement post isoproterenol induced cardiac injury in a rat model following human WJMSCs transplantation. MATERIALS AND METHODS: MSCs were extracted and cultured from cord WJ, characterized by morphology, Immunophenotyping and differentiation to osteoblast and adipocytes. WJMSCs were labeled with PKH2 linker dye. Wistar rats were divided into control group, ISO group (injected with 2 doses of isoproterenol) to induce myocardial injury and ISO group transplanted with labelled WJMSCs. ECG, electrocardiographic patterns, cardiac marker enzymes, tracing of labeled MSCs and immunohistochemical analysis of myocardial cryosections were studied. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: WJ derived MSCs were expanded for more than 14 passages while maintaining their un-differentiated state, were positive for MSC markers and were able to differentiate into adipocyte and osteoblast. We demonstrated that intravenously administered WJMSCs were capable of homing predominently in the ischemic myocardium. Cardiac markers were positively altered in stem cell treated group compared to ISO group. ECG and ECHO changes were improved with higher survival rate. WJMSCs could differentiate into cardiac-like cells (positive for cardiac specific proteins) in vivo. WJMSCs infusion promoted cardiac protection and reduced mortality, emphasizing a promising therapeutic role for myocardial insufficiency.

Repairing effect of embryonic stem cells on injured maternal myocardium in pregnant mice / 中国实验动物学报

Objective To determine if fetal stem cells can enter the maternal circulation during pregnancy and re-pair the injuries of maternal heart.Methods C57 female mice at the age of 6-8 weeks were randomly assigned to three groups:sham control, surgery without pregnancy, and surgery with pregnancy ( n=8,eath group) .The control sham group was developed by opening and closing of the chest.The other two groups underwent heart surgery.The myocardial infarc-tion ( MI) model was induced by ligation of the left anterior descending coronary artery.Half of the surgical mice mated with e-GFP transgenic male mice, and another half group was not.Electrocardiogram ( ECG) and echocardiographic images were recorded at pre-operation, post-operation and postpartum.The collected data were used to evaluate the heart function. The GFP expression was detected by immunohistochemistry and q-PCR.Results When compared with the sham group, both the ischemia surgery groups with and without pregnancy, the ECG ST segment was significantly increased.This meas-urement indicated that the myocardial ischemia surgery was successful, and no significant difference in the ST segments be-tween two ischemia surgery groups was found.However, when ECG was measured in the surgical mice after postpartum, their myocardial ischemia was dramatically improved when compared with that of the ischemia surgery only mice.Echocar-diographic images also indicated that both the surgery groups had myocardial ischemia, however, no significant difference was observed in the pregnant mice before and after postpartum.The order of the cardiac function indexes from high to low was the sham group, surgery with pregnancy group, and surgery with no pregnancy group;in particular, the cardiac func-tion of pregnancy group was significantly enhanced compared with that of the surgery with no pregnancy group (P<0.05). More importantly, both immunofluorescence and q-PCR results showed that the embryonic stem cell translocation through circulation system with GFP expression in the heart of pregnancy group, while negative in other two groups.Conclusions Embryonic stem cells can be transferred into the maternal circulation of pregnant mice, and play a role in the repairing of their cardiac injuries.

Strategies for promoting survival,differentiation of stem cells after transplantation and repairing ischemic myocardium / 基础医学与临床

The low survival rate of stem cells in the ischemic myocardium microenvironment is the bottle neck in treating ischemic diseases with stem cell transplantation.It is able to increase anti-apoptotic ability of the stem cells and promote their effective differentiation towards myocardial cells directly and indirectly by pretreating the stem cells with cytokines,drugs or chemical compounds,or modifying gene expression to promote cell adhesion,survival or angiogenesis for repairing ischemic myocardium and improving heart function after transplantation of the stem cells.