Gene delivery of hypoxia-inducible VEGF targeting collagen effectively improves cardiac function after myocardial infarction.

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) plays important roles in improvement of cardiac function following myocardial infarction (MI). However, the lack of a steerable delivery system of VEGF targeting the infarcted myocardium reduces the therapeutic efficacy and safety. Here, we constructed a series of lentiviral vector systems which could express a fusion protein consisted of a collagen-binding domain (CBD) and hVEGF (CBDhVEGF), under the control of 5HRE-hCMVmp (5HRE), the hypoxia-inducible promoter consists of five copies of the hypoxia-responsive element (HRE) and a human cytomegalovirus minimal promoter (hCMVmp).