Human myoblast transplantation in mice infarcted heart alters the expression profile of cardiac genes associated with left ventricle remodeling.

BACKGROUND: Myocardial infarction (MI) and left ventricle remodeling (LVR) are two of the most challenging disease entities in developed societies. Since conventional treatment cannot fully restore heart function new approaches were attempted to develop new strategies and technologies that could be used for myocardial regeneration. One of these strategies pursued was a cell therapy--particularly applying skeletal muscle stem cells (SkMCs).

METHODS AND RESULTS: Using NOD-SCID murine model of MI and human skeletal myoblast transplantation we were able to show that SkMC administration significantly affected gene expression profile (p<0.05) (NPPB, CTGF, GATA4, SERCA2a, PLB) of the heart ventricular tissue and this change was beneficial for the heart function. We have also shown, that the level of heart biomarker, NT-proBNP, decreased in animals receiving implanted cells and that the NT-proBNP level negatively correlated with left ventricle area fraction change (LVFAC) index which makes NT-proBNP an attractive tool in assessing the efficacy of cell therapy both in the animal model and prospectively in clinical trials.

CONCLUSIONS: The results obtained suggest that transplanted SkMCs exerted beneficial effect on heart regeneration and were able to inhibit LVR which was confirmed on the molecular level, giving hope for new ways of monitoring novel cellular therapies for MI.