Background: B vitamin deficiency has been previously reported to be prevalent in patients with heart failure. However, clinical trials investigating the potential of B vitamin supplementation have failed to show benefit and have suggested some evidence of harm. Negative findings have been hypothesized to be the result of an anti-angiogenic effect associated with B vitamin supplementation.
Ultrasound-mediated gene delivery (UMGD) is a non-invasive gene transfer technique, utilizing high power ultrasound and DNA-bearing microbubbles. Despite modest transfection efficiency, its high organ, tissue specificity and repeatability make it an attractive therapeutic option. UMGD has been used in a variety of in vivo applications, including cardiac and skeletal muscle, kidney, liver, cerebral and even lung, and have been studied using many gene vectors, including plasmid, viral and small interfering RNA. This presentation will focus specifically on cardiac applications using plasmid DNA, including 1) introduction of UMGD in the heart, including optimization of parameters and protocols, 2) UMGD for therapeutic angiogenesis in chronic ischemia, including multi pro-angiogenic gene therapy and combination gene-and progenitor cell-based therapies for chronic hindlimb ischemia, and 3) applications for anti-apoptotic therapy in heart failure and ischemia-reperfusion injury.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.