Transplantation of magnetic-labelled vascular cells and cardiomyocytes isolated from human embryonic stem cells in a bioactive injectable gel for myocardium regeneration after infarct

Project Information

HEARTREGENERATION

Grant agreement ID: 230929

Project closed

Start date 1 April 2009

End date 31 March 2013

Funded under

• Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Total cost € 100 000,00

EU contribution € 100 000,00

Coordinated by

CENTRO DE NEUROCIENCIAS E BIOLOGIACELULAR ASSOCIACAO
Portugal

Objective

Cardiovascular diseases remain the number one cause of death in the western world. Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) represent a promising source of cells for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases because of their unlimited cell propagation and ability to give rise to different cell types, including cardiomyocytes, endothelial and smooth muscle cells. Cardiomyocytes isolated from hESCs have been shown to form new myocardium after infarct; however, the functional recovery of the myocardium was low and the functional coupling was inexistent since the cardiomyocytes were observed within the scar and not in direct contact with host cardiomyocytes (Laflamme et al., Nat Biotechnol 2007). So far, no studies have reported the benefits of prevascularizing cardiomyocyte cell constructs to enhance in vivo cell viability, grafting and functional coupling. Additionally, we anticipate that the transplantation of these cells using an injectable bioactive gel will enhance cell retention and viability at the injection site. This projects aims at evaluating the neovascularization and myocardium functional recovery after transplanting hESC-derived cardiomyocytes and vascular cells into a myocardial infarction animal model. Recently, we isolated endothelial and smooth muscle cells from hESCs that form microvessels when injected subcutaneously in nude mice and thus might be an important cell source for the vascularization of the myocardium. In addition, this projects aims at developing a bioactive injectable gel to function as a temporary three-dimensional scaffold and a protocol to monitor non-invasively in vivo cell grafting.

Fields of science

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

• medical and health sciences › medical biotechnology › cells technologies › stem cells
• medical and health sciences › clinical medicine › cardiology › cardiovascular diseases
• medical and health sciences › clinical medicine › transplantation

Keywords

• biomaterial engineering
• myocardial infarction
• nanotechnologies
• stem cells
• tissue engineering
• vascularization

Programme(s)

• FP7-PEOPLE - Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

• PEOPLE-2007-4-3.IRG - Marie Curie Action: "International Reintegration Grants"

Call for proposal

FP7-PEOPLE-IRG-2008
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

MC-IRG - International Re-integration Grants (IRG)

Coordinator

CENTRO DE NEUROCIENCIAS E BIOLOGIACELULAR ASSOCIACAO

• EU contribution: € 100 000,00
• Address: UNIVERSIDADE DE COIMBRA LARGO MARQUES DE POMBAL ; 3004 517 Coimbra ; Portugal
• Region: Continente › Centro (PT) › Região de Coimbra
• Activity type: Research Organisations
• Administrative Contact: Euclides Pires (Dr.)
• Total cost: No data