Bioluminescence Imaging of Human Embryonic Stem Cell-Derived Endothelial Cells for Treatment of Myocardial Infarction

Myocardial infarction is a leading cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide, and current treatments fail to address the underlying scarring and cell loss, which is a major cause of heart failure after infarction. The novel strategy, therapeutic angiogenesis and/or vasculogenesis with endothelial progenitor cells transplantation holds great promise to increase blood flow in ischemic areas, thus rebuild the injured heart and reverse the heart failure. Given the potential of self-renewal and differentiation into virtually all cell types, human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) may provide an alternate source of therapeutic cells by allowing the derivation of large numbers of endothelial cells for therapeutic angiogenesis and/or vasculogenesis of ischemic heart diseases. Moreover, to fully understand the fate of implanted hESCs or hESC derivatives, investigators need to monitor the motility of cells in living animals over time. In this chapter, we describe the application of bioluminescence reporter gene imaging to track the transplanted hESC-derived endothelial cells for treatment of myocardial infarction. The technology of inducing endothelial cells from hESCs will also be discussed.