An interesting article in the journal Circulation Research
A team of authors with a significant number of colleagues from Center for Translational Medicine FNUSA-ICRC has published an article in the official journal of the American Heart Association entitled “Multiscale analysis of ECM remodeling in the failing heart.” Circulation Research covers research on all aspects of the cardiovascular system and its Impact Factor is 14.5.
The study by the first author Ana Rubina Perestrelo, led by Giancarlo Forte, was created in international collaboration with other entities. “Thanks to the cooperation with the Center for Cardiovascular and Transplant Surgery in Brno, we obtained heart tissue samples from patients undergoing heart transplantation,” said Giancarlo Forte. The authors collaborated with the University of Porto and the CEITEC research center on a unique 3D map of changes that occur in the human heart during pathological conditions. A computational model for the identification of a protein involved in the remodeling of a diseased ECM has been developed in collaboration with the Italian University of Calabria and the University Campus Bio Medico in Rome.
The authors dealt with so far little-studied pathological process in the human heart, which was studied in more detail only in mice. These are changes in the extracellular matrix, ie in the scaffold structure, which ultimately lead to the failure of the whole organ. The results of this study, which generated the first ever 3D map of changes that occur in the human heart during end-stage pathological conditions (eg, ischemic and dilated cardiomyopathy), are potentially of interest to scientists who are interested in studying the molecular basis of heart disease. “They also provide a number of new data sets for experimental cardiologists who are willing to design innovative treatments for these conditions,” said Giancarlo Forte.
The research has been funded by OP VVV project CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000492 (MAGNET).
Description of the picture:
Representative microscopic images of human healthy (CTL) and pathological heart. DCM: dilated cardiomyopathy, IHD (ischemic heart disease). Red colour identifies the healthy muscle, which is substituted by non-contractile fibrotic tissue in pathological heart (blue).
