The NHLBI recently instituted the Cardiovascular Cell Therapy Research Network (CCTRN) to conduct novel cell therapy clinical trials for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. We seek to bridge the gap between cells injected and clinical outcome, and will test the overarching hypothesis that functional characteristics of injected cells dictate patients'responses to marrow cell therapy injections. We propose to measure cell function before cell therapy injections, enabling us to quantify relationships between cell function results and subsequent clinical outcomes. Specifically, we aim to test cell migration and nitric oxide activity based on the proven utility of these mechanisms in predicting myocardial neovasculogenesis. Whereas the source of transplanted cells are the same (bone marrow) for all three CCTRN trials (FOCUS, TIME and Late TIME), the clinical response measures of interest for this proposal are the primary clinical outcomes of the respective trial. The ability to predict outcome of a cell therapeutic intervention based on functional characteristics of the injected cells will greatly accelerate development of methods to improve cell function and the pace of cell therapy. The NHLBI recently instituted the Cardiovascular Cell Therapy Research Network (CCTRN) to conduct novel cell therapy clinical trials for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. This proposal establishes a CCTRN ancillary functional studies laboratory consortium to bridge the gap between cells injected and clinical outcome. Results from ancillary studies in this proposal are crucially important for the interpretation of current CCTRN trials and will be used to construct future CCTRN cell therapy trials.
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