Cardiovascular nanomedicine

BACKGROUND: Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is a common cardiovascular disease in clinic. Currently, there is no specific treatment for AMI. Carbon dots (CDs) have been reported to show excellent biological activities, which hold promise for the development of novel nanomedicines for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. METHODS: In this study, we firstly prepared CDs from the natural herb Curcumae Radix Carbonisata (CRC-CDs) by a green, simple calcination method...

Cell-mediated nanoparticle delivery systems (CMNDDs) utilize cells as carriers to deliver the drug-loaded nanoparticles. Unlike the traditional nanoparticle drug delivery approaches, CMNDDs take the advantages of cell characteristics, such as the homing capabilities of stem cells, inflammatory chemotaxis of neutrophils, prolonged blood circulation of red blood cells, and internalization of macrophages. Subsequently, CMNDDs can easily prolong the blood circulation, cross biological barriers, such as the blood-brain barrier and the bone marrow-blood barrier, and rapidly arrive at the diseased areas...

Liposomes-microscopic phospholipid bubbles with bilayered membrane structure-have been a focal point in drug delivery research for the past 30 years. Current liposomes possess a blend of biocompatibility, drug loading efficiency, prolonged circulation and targeted delivery. Tailored liposomes, varying in size, charge, lipid composition, and ratio, have been developed to address diseases in specific organs, thereby enhancing drug circulation, accumulation at lesion sites, intracellular delivery, and treatment efficacy for various organ-specific diseases...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) pose a significant global health threat due to their complex pathogenesis and high incidence, imposing a substantial burden on global healthcare systems. Integrins, a group of heterodimers consisting of α and β subunits that are located on the cell membrane, have emerged as key players in mediating the occurrence and progression of CVDs by regulating the physiological activities of endothelial cells, vascular smooth muscle cells, platelets, fibroblasts, cardiomyocytes, and various immune cells...

Vascular diseases seriously threaten human life and health. Exogenous delivery of nitric oxide (NO) represents an effective approach for maintaining vascular homeostasis during pathological events. However, the overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) at vascular injury sites would react with NO to produce damaging peroxynitrite (ONOO- ) species and limit the therapeutic effect of NO. Hence, we design a ROS-responsive NO nanomedicine (t-PBA&NO NP) with ROS scavenging ability to solve the dilemma of NO-based therapy...

BACKGROUND: For maintenance therapy in type 2 diabetes, glucagon-like peptide-1 agonist (GLP-1A), which exhibits low cardiovascular risk and high efficacy, is a promising peptide therapeutic. However, developing an oral GLP-1A presents challenges due to the analog's poor cellular permeability and gastrointestinal (GI) stability. METHODS: To mitigate such limitations, an oral nanoformulation of liraglutide (LG) was designed and achieved by combining LG with bile acid derivatives using the nanoprecipitation method...

Coronary stents have saved millions of lives in the last three decades by treating atherosclerosis especially, by preventing plaque protrusion and subsequent aneurysms. They attenuate the vascular SMC proliferation and promote reconstruction of the endothelial bed to ensure superior revascularization. With the evolution of modern stent types, nanotechnology has become an integral part of stent technology. Nanocoating and nanosurface fabrication on metallic and polymeric stents have improved their drug loading capacity as well as other mechanical, physico-chemical, and biological properties...

Diabetes is one of the most prevalent diseases worldwide. In recent decades, type-2 diabetes has become increasingly common, particularly in younger individuals. Diabetes leads to many vascular complications, including atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is a cardiovascular disease characterized by lipid-rich plaques within the vasculature. Plaques develop over time, restricting blood flow; and can therefore be the underlying cause of major adverse cardiovascular events, including myocardial infarction and stroke...

Neuroinflammation has emerged as a major concern in ischemic stroke therapy because it exacebates neurological dysfunction and suppresses neurological recovery after ischemia/reperfusion. Fingolimod hydrochloride (FTY720) is an FDA-approved anti-inflammatory drug which exhibits potential neuroprotective effects in ischemic brain parenchyma. However, delivering a sufficient amount of FTY720 through the blood-brain barrier into brain lesions without inducing severe cardiovascular side effects remains challenging...

BACKGROUND: The ancient Chinese herb Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge (Danshen), plays the important role in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. Furthermore, Danshen could also be used for curing carcinogenesis. Up to now, the anti-tumor effects of the main active constituents of Danshen have made great progress. However, the bioavailability of the active constituents of Danshen were restricted by their unique physical characteristics, like low oral bioavailability, rapid degradation in vivo and so on...

PURPOSE: Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) is an emerging medical imaging modality that is on the verge of clinical use. In recent years, cardiovascular applications have shown huge potential like, e.g., intraprocedural imaging guidance of stent placement through MPI. Due to the lack of signal generation, nano-modifications have been necessary to visualize commercial medical instruments until now. In this work, it is investigated if commercial interventional devices can be tracked with MPI without any nano-modification...

The effects of an increasingly elderly population are among the most far-reaching in 21st-century society. The growing healthcare expense is mainly attributable to the increased incidence of chronic illnesses that accompany longer life expectancies. Different ideas have been put up to explain aging, but it is widely accepted that oxidative damage to proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids contributes to the aging process. Increases in life expectancy in all contemporary industrialized cultures are accompanied by sharp increases in the prevalence of age-related diseases such as cardiovascular and neurological conditions, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and cancer...

Platelets play a pivotal role in many physiological and pathological processes, with their special targeting/adhering properties towards infarcted myocardium, injured or dysfunctional endothelium, and growing thrombus. Leveraging the site-targeting/adhering property, a variety of platelet-inspired targeting delivery（PITD）designs have been developed, the majority of which are reached by hitchhiking live platelets, cloaking nanoparticles with platelet membranes and mimicking platelet functions. With PITD, drugs or regenerative cells can directly reach targeted sites with minimized systematical distribution thus being of great clinical benefits...

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a complication of pulmonary disease that produces life-threatening hypoxaemia. Despite ventilation and hyperoxic therapies, undetected hypoxia can manifest in capillary beds leading to multi-organ failure. Ox66™ is an ingestible, solid-state form of oxygen designed to supplement oxygen deficits. Twenty-four anaesthetized rats underwent a two-hit model of respiratory distress (ARDS), where a single dose (5 mg/kg) of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) was given intratracheally, and then the respiratory tidal volume was reduced by 40%...

Vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1) was identified over 2 decades ago as an endothelial adhesion receptor involved in leukocyte recruitment and cell-based immune responses. In atherosclerosis, a chronic inflammatory disease of the blood vessels that is the leading cause of death in the USA, endothelial VCAM-1 is robustly expressed beginning in the early stages of the disease. The interactions of circulating immune cells with VCAM-1 on the activated endothelial cell surface promote the uptake of monocytes and the progression of atherosclerotic lesions in susceptible vessels...

Rationale: The DNA-dependent protein kinase catalytic subunit (DNA-PKcs) promotes pathological mitochondrial fission during septic acute kidney injury. The mitochondrial open reading frame of the 12S rRNA type-c (MOTS-c) is a mitochondria-derived peptide that exhibits anti-inflammatory properties during cardiovascular illnesses. We explored whether endotoxemia-induced myocardial microvascular injury involved DNA-PKcs and MOTS-c dysregulation. Methods: To induce endotoxemia in vivo, endothelial cell-specific DNA-PKcs- knockout mice were injected intraperitoneally with a single dose of lipopolysaccharide (10 mg/kg) and evaluated after 72 h...

Atherosclerosis, a multifaceted chronic inflammatory disease, has a profound impact on cardiovascular health. However, the critical limitations of atherosclerosis management include the delayed detection of advanced stages, the intricate assessment of plaque stability, and the absence of efficacious therapeutic strategies. Nanotheranostic based on nanotechnology offers a novel paradigm for addressing these challenges by amalgamating advanced imaging capabilities with targeted therapeutic interventions. Meanwhile, iron oxide nanoparticles have emerged as compelling candidates for theranostic applications in atherosclerosis due to their magnetic resonance imaging capability and biosafety...

Vascular stent implantation remains the major therapeutic method for cardiovascular diseases currently. We here introduced crucial biological functional biological function factors (SDF-1α, VEGF) and vital metal ions (Zn2+ ) into the stent surface to explore their synergistic effect in the microenvironment. The combination of the different factors is known to effectively regulate cellular inflammatory response and selectively regulate cell biological behavior. Meanwhile, in the implemented method, VEGF and Zn2+ were loaded into heparin and poly-l-lysine (Hep-PLL) nanoparticles, ensuring a controlled release of functional molecules with a multi-factor synergistic effect and excellent biological functions in vitro and in vivo...

Cardiovascular disease is one of the chief factors that cause ischemic stroke, myocardial infarction, and venous thromboembolism. The elements that speed up thrombosis include nutritional consumption, physical activity, and oxidative stress. Even though the precise etiology and pathophysiology remain difficult topics that primarily rely on traditional medicine. The diagnosis and management of thrombosis are being developed using discrete non-invasive and non-surgical approaches. One of the emerging promising approach is ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging...

Rationale: The gut and its accessory organ, the liver, are crucial determinants of metabolic homeostasis via the regulation of circulating lipids for cardiovascular health. In response to environmental insults, cells undergo diverse adaptation or pathophysiological processes via stress-responsive eukaryotic initiation factor 2 alpha (eIF2α) kinase signaling and subsequent cellular reprogramming. We noted that patients with inflammatory gut distress display enhanced levels of ribosomal stress-responsive eIF2α kinase, which is notably associated with lipid metabolic process genes...