Targeting regenerative exosomes to myocardial infarction using cardiac homing peptide

Vandergriff, Adam; Huang, Ke; Shen, Deliang; Hu, Shiqi; Hensley, Michael Taylor; Caranasos, Thomas G.; Qian, Li; Cheng, Ke

After a 4 h recovery period following the ischemia/reperfusion injury, the ejection fraction of all animals was indistinguishable in all groups, indicating a similar degree of initial injury. The animals were given 21 days for the treatments to take effect and repair the myocardial damage. Heart function was again measured by echocardiogram and tissues were collected for histological analysis. Echocardiography results demonstrated that CHP-XO treatment resulted in increased heart function over both other groups (Figure 3A-C) . As cardiac fibrosis contributes to the reduction of cardiac function, Masson's Trichrome staining was used to measure the size of the fibrotic region. Upon measuring the images, injection of CHP-XOs led to a decrease in the infarcted tissue area and consequently an increase in viable tissue in the at-risk region (Figure 3D-F) .