Sagartirtha Sarkar and Santanu Rana
Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Biol Syst Open Access
Diverse array of therapeutic regimens, drugs or siRNA are commonly used to regress cardiac hypertrophy, although, bystander effect and lower retention of bioactive molecules significantly reduce their functional efficacy. Carvedilol, a widely used drug against cardiac ailments has been reported to modulate metabolic profile of liver and glomerular filtration rate in kidney while non-targeted genome-wide knock down of p53 gene though has been demonstrated to improve cardiac function considerably, yet leads to acute tumorigenesis all over the body thus affecting bystander organs. Therefore, tissue targeted delivery of therapeutics had been a challenge in effective treatment of cardiovascular dysfunction. This study reports a successful accomplishment of cardiac tissue engineering in our laboratory by delivering bioactive therapeutic molecules encapsulated with a homing peptide conjugated to stearic acid modified Carboxymethyl chitosan (CMC) nanopolymer to hypertrophied cardiomyocytes in vivo. The peptide precisely targeted cardiomyocytes while CMC served as the vector mediator to pathological myocardium. Controlled delivery of active therapeutic payloads within cardiomyocytes resulted in effective regression of cardiac hypertrophy. Thus, this novel nano construct as a spatiotemporal vector would be a potential clinical tool for developing effective therapeutic strategies within cardiac micro-environment via on-target therapeutic delivery of desired therapeutics in active form and at controlled dosage for effective management of myocardial pathophysiology.
