Key achievements and results

Study of the myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury mechanisms and development of the new methods for diagnosis and experimental treatment of myocardial ischemia are a major focus of the Laboratory. A series of experiments in 2007—2010 showed cardioprotective efficacy of different types of myocardial preconditioning, including local and remote ischemic preconditioning, pharmacological and metabolic preconditioning and preconditioning by physical factors. In addition, antiarrhythmic effects of myocardial ischemic postconditioning were first demonstrated.

Researchers of the Department together with the colleagues of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics (A.V. Fedorov, K.A. Kondratov) carried out a study of biomarker and regulatory roles of miRNAs in ischemia/reperfusion. It was shown that levels of several cardiac-specific miRNAs in blood plasma correlate well with the degree of myocardial injury.

In recent years, researchers of the Department jointly with the specialists from the Research Laboratory of Nanotechnology have proved the concept of targeted delivery of the cardioprotective drugs into ischemic myocardium. The team have obtained and published data on the possibility of passive targeted delivery of adenosine in rats with myocardial ischemia/reperfusion using silica nanoparticles. Currently, there is an ongoing study of the effects of targeted drug delivery using nanoparticles with optimized profile of biodistribution and biodegradation, in particular polyorganosiloxane.

The Department obtained a patent for invention entitled «Method for intraoperative imaging of myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury» (authors: G. V. Papayan, N. N. Petrishchev, M. M Galagudza, D. L. Sonin, S. M. Minasyan). The materials were summarized in the article «Intraoperative indocyanine green fluorescence imaging of myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury» and published in the journal Biomedical Optics Express.

Studies are underway to determine the metabolic status of the myocardium during repeated episodes of total ischemia-reperfusion injury ex vivo under various conditions of excitation of autofluorescence using a FOS-M fluorescence–reflection fiber spectrometer.

Since 2014, together with specialists of the Institute of Macromolecular Compounds of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Yu.A. Skorik and A.A. Golyshev), the researchers have been investigating the possibility of using chitosan and its derivatives as nanocarriers for targeted delivery.

Since 2016, the researchers have been conducting the first chronic experiments using SPF rats.