Why the study?
Do nucleic acid drugs prevent cardiac rejection in experimental heart transplant models?
Do nucleic acid drugs prevent cardiac rejection in experimental heart transplant models?
Nucleic acid drugs, including decoy strategies targeting transcription factors, represent a potential therapeutic approach for preventing acute and chronic cardiac rejection in experimental models.
Nucleic acid drugs remain investigational for cardiac rejection; leaves open clinical translation pending human trials.
Heart transplantation has been broadly performed in humans. However, occurrence of acute and chronic rejection has not yet been resolved. Several inflammatory factors, such as cytokines and adhesion molecules, enhance the rejection. The graft arterial disease (GAD), which is a type of chronic rejection, is characterized by intimal thickening comprised of proliferative smooth muscle cells. Specific treatments that target the attenuation of acute rejection and GAD formation have not been well studied in cardiac transplantation. Recent progress in the nucleic acid drugs, such as antisense oligodeoxynucleotides (ODNs) to regulate the transcription of disease-related genes, has important roles in therapeutic applications. Transfection of cis-element double-stranded DNA, named as "decoy," has been also reported to be a useful nucleic acid drug. This decoy strategy has been not only a useful method for the experimental studies of gene regulation but also a novel clinical strategy. In this paper, we reviewed the experimental results of NF-kappaB, E2F, AP-1, and STAT-1 decoy and other ODNs using the experimental heart transplant models.
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Suzuki et al. (2009) studied this question.
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