Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death throughout the world and various estimates predict that heart disease will remain the number one killer in the world. Pharmacotherapies have not shown significant long term survival benefits to the patients, therefore alternate therapeutic strategies such as bioactive agent delivery and cell therapy based approaches are being investigated. One of the major causes of heart failure is the disease progression after an ischemic event and any successful therapy will be needed over the course of several days/weeks. Oxidative stress is greatly increased in the myocardium following infarction. This plays a significant role in cardiac disease progression and it has also been implicated in the failure of implanted cell therapy. Therefore, reducing oxidative stress in damaged tissue using antioxidants may have broad clinical implications for both the treatment of cardiac dysfunction and for cardiac regeneration applications. This dissertation work examines the effect of sustained delivery of endogenous antioxidant superoxide dismutase (SOD) to the rat myocardium following ischemia/reperfusion (IR) using polyketal polymers as drug carriers. The second major objective of this dissertation is to examine the effects of oxidative stress on cardiac progenitor cells - a promising endogenous adult stem cell in cardiac cell therapy applications
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/42846 |
| Date | 07 November 2011 |
| Creators | Iyer, Gokulakrishnan Seshadri |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
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