Effect of Intramyocardial Administration of Baculovirus Encoding the Transcription Factor Tbx20 in Sheep With Experimental Acute Myocardial Infarction.

Background: Gene therapy has been proposed as a strategy to induce cardiac regeneration following acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Given that Tbx20, a transcription factor of the T-box subfamily, stimulates cell proliferation and angiogenesis, we designed a baculovirus overexpressing (Bv-Tbx20) and evaluated its effects in cultured cardiomyocytes and in an ovine model of AMI.

Methods And Results: Cell proliferation and angiogenesis were measured in cardiomyocytes transduced with Bv-Tbx20 or Bv-Null (control).

Gene Therapy: Targeting Cardiomyocyte Proliferation to Repopulate the Ischemic Heart.

Adult mammalian cardiomyocytes show scarce division ability, which makes the heart ineffective in replacing lost contractile cells after ischemic cardiomyopathy. In the past decades, there have been increasing efforts in the search for novel strategies to regenerate the injured myocardium. Among them, gene therapy is one of the most promising ones, based on recent and emerging studies that support the fact that functional cardiomyocyte regeneration can be accomplished by the stimulation and enhancement of the endogenous ability of these cells to achieve cell division.

Contribution of myocardium hydraulic skeleton to left ventricular wall interaction and synergy in dogs.

The most premature motion change after coronary occlusion is early diastolic thinning of the ischemic left ventricular (LV) wall, with concomitant thickening of the normoperfused wall. We aimed 1). to demonstrate that these early changes are the result of the absence of fluid within the ischemic myocardium (hydraulic skeleton) rather than to cell anoxia and 2).