About this Research Topic

Background

Any cardiac injury results in loss of contractile function, due to the low, if not null, spontaneous regenerative potential of the adult mammalian heart. Innovative therapeutic strategies aim at either maximizing survival of remaining cardiomyocytes (cardioprotection) or inducing the formation of new contractile tissue (cardiac regeneration). This latter goal can be achieved by either implanting exogenous cardiac cells and tissue or stimulating the proliferation of endogenous cardiomyocytes. Ischemic heart disease has an enormous burden on public health. In addition, an increasing number of oncologic patients are treated with classic chemotherapeutics, radiotherapy and novel biologic drugs, which unfortunately often lead to cardiac damage.

Both cardioprotection and regeneration stand as promising, innovative therapies for a variety of common cardiac diseases, and in particular for cardiac ischemia. Yet, major issues remain outstanding, including how to best translate these approaches into real therapies, what are the most appropriate target patient populations, what is the best timing for their administrations and potential side effects. The goal of this special issue is to attract papers regarding advances in the pathophysiology of the ischemia/reperfusion damage, or of the damage of cardiotoxic anticancer treatments, to identify novel molecular targets that can be used therapeutically.

In this Research Topic authors are invited to submit their original research articles, reviews or commentaries that expand the current knowledge on mechanisms of cardioprotection and regeneration and pave the way to effective strategies to bring these concepts to the clinics. Topics of interest are:
• Novel insights in the pathophysiology of ischemic heart disease
• Novel insights in the pathophysiology of cardiotoxicity of anticancer treatments
• Nucleic acid and protein therapies promoting cardiomyocyte survival
• Nucleic acid and protein therapies promoting cardiomyocyte proliferation
• Clinical advances on cardioprotection
• Clinical studies on cardiac regeneration
• Cell-based therapies for cardiac regeneration
• Imaging technologies to assess cardiomyocyte viability and proliferation
• Animal models to study cardioprotection and regeneration

Keywords: Cardiac damage/injury, Cardiomyocyte proliferation, Stem cells, Multinucleation, Cardiac regeneration, cardioprotection

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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