Grant: Peter Lougheed/CIHR New Investigator Canada's Premier Young Researcher

Coronary artery disease, leading to chest pain and heart attacks, is the leading cause of death in the developed world. The damaged heart muscle is replaced with scar tissue resulting in diminished ability to pump blood and culminating in heart failure in a third of all patients, even with all the treatments provided by modern medicine. Based on positive results in small animals, there is hope that cell-based therapies using transplants of progenitor cells, such as bone marrow derived in stem cells, will provide a means to reduce the incidence of heart failure by repairing the damaged heart tissue. In research towards this goal, methods for following the location and studying the activity of these transplanted cells are of utmost importance. Magnetic resonance imaging has shown a great deal of promise for tracking the location of stem cells non-invasively. In the proposed research plan, a novel method for imaging stems cells such that the signal is bright (as opposed to dark with conventional methods) is developed towards application in the clinic. In a second project component, MRI of hyperpolarized carbon-13, which enables the direct imaging of metabolism using an MRI machine, is studied. This new method is proposed for studying cellular metabolism in and around damaged heart muscle to better plan and evaluate regenerative therapy.