Nicole Teresa Feric

• University of Toronto

Significance Current treatments for diabetic chronic wounds fail to achieve effective therapeutic outcomes. The majority of these treatments focus on angiogenesis, but diabetes often involves endothelial dysfunction. A hallmark of regenerative wound healing is rapid, effective re-epithelialization. In this study, we present QHREDGS (glutamine-histi...

Animal models have been instrumental in providing insight into the molecular basis of disease. While such information has been successfully applied to the study of human disease, this translation would be significantly strengthened by the availability of models based on human cells. This would be particularly important for cardiovascular disease, a...

Significance: This article outlines the advantages and limitations of the cell injection and patch approaches to cardiac regenerative therapy. If the field is to move forward, some fundamental questions require answers, including the limitations to the use of animal models for human cell-transplantation studies; the best way to measure success in...

Engineering functional human cardiac tissue that mimics the native adult morphological and functional phenotype has been a long held objective. In the last 5 years, the field of cardiac tissue engineering has transitioned from cardiac tissues derived from various animal species to the production of the first generation of human engineered cardiac t...

-Hydrogels are being actively investigated for direct delivery of cells or bioactive molecules to the heart post-myocardial infarction (MI) to prevent cardiac functional loss. We postulate that immobilization of the pro-survival angiopoietin-1-derived peptide, QHREDGS, to a chitosan-collagen hydrogel could produce a clinically translatable thermo-r...

Methods that increase cardiomyocyte survival upon exposure to ischemia, hypoxia and reoxygenation injuries are required to improve the efficacy of cardiac cell therapy and enhance the viability and function of engineered tissues. We investigated the effect of combined hypoxia/NaNO2 pretreatment on rat neonatal cardiomyocyte (CM), cardiac fibroblast...

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the developed world, and as such there is a pressing need for novel treatment options. Since the only viable treatment option for end-stage heart failure is a heart transplant, cardiac tissue engineering emerged from the need to develop alternative sources and methods of replacing tissue damag...

In surgical repair for heart disease, it is often necessary to implant conduits or correct tissue defects. Commonly used graft materials include artifi cial grafts, autologous tissues, allografts and xenografts. However, none of these offer growth potential, and all are associated with varying levels of thrombogenicity and susceptibility to infecti...

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the world and is likely to remain as such in the foreseeable future. There is a great deal of optimism for cardiac regenerative therapies because recent advances in stem cell technology have made it possible to derive millions of cardiomyocytes from human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent st...

In recent years, the development of three-dimensional engineered heart tissue (EHT) has made large strides forward due to advances in stem cell biology, materials science, pre-vascularization strategies and nanotechnology. As a result, the role of tissue engineering in cardiac regenerative medicine has become multi-faceted as new applications becom...

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the developed world, and as such there is a pressing need for treatment options. Cardiac tissue engineering emerged from the need to develop alternative sources and methods of replacing tissue damaged by cardiovascular diseases, as the ultimate treatment option for many who suffer from end-sta...

Bone loss occurs as a consequence of a variety of diseases as well as from traumatic injuries, and often requires therapeutic intervention. Strategies for repairing and replacing damaged and/or lost bone tissue include the use of biomaterials and medical implant devices with and without osteoinductive coatings. The soluble growth factor angiopoieti...

Effect of apo(a) on PDGF-induced ERK phosphorylation. Cells were treated with increasing concentrations of apo(a) either alone or in combination with 10 ng/mL PDGF for 20 min, and lysates blotted for phospho-ERK-1/2 and total ERK-1/2 (upper panel). Densitometry data were normalised to the lane containing PDGF alone, and analysed using ratio repeate...

Effect of passage number on SV-SMC migration. (A) Basal migration rates were collated for SV-SMC from all patient donors used in the study and separated according to passage number. (B) Fold change in migration in response to apo(a) in the upper chamber or (C) PDGF in the lower chamber according to passage number. All comparisons were non-significa...

Effect of RhoA siRNA and ROCK inhibition on apo(a) migration in the presence of PDGF. (A) Number of migrated cells per HP field in response to PDGF and apo(a) following RhoA silencing (closed bars) compared to mock transfected cells (open bars, n = 7). (B) Migration in response to PDGF and apo(a) following pre-treatment with vehicle control (0.002%...

Lipoprotein(a) (Lp(a)) is an independent risk factor for the development of cardiovascular disease. Vascular smooth muscle cell (SMC) motility and plasticity, functions that are influenced by environmental cues, are vital to adaptation and remodelling in vascular physiology and pathophysiology. Lp(a) is reportedly damaging to SMC function via unkno...

Previous studies demonstrated the importance of substrate stiffness and topography on the phenotype of many different cell types including fibroblasts. Yet the interaction of these two physical parameters remains insufficiently characterized, in particular for cardiac fibroblasts. Most studies focusing on contact guidance use rigid patterned substr...

Macrophage apoptosis in advanced atheromata, a key process in plaque necrosis, involves the combination of ER stress with other proapoptotic stimuli. We show here that oxidized phospholipids, oxidized LDL, saturated fatty acids (SFAs), and lipoprotein(a) trigger apoptosis in ER-stressed macrophages through a mechanism requiring both CD36 and Toll-l...

Elevated plasma concentrations of lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)] are associated with an increased risk for thrombotic disorders. Lp(a) is a unique lipoprotein consisting of a low-density lipoprotein-like moiety covalently linked to apolipoprotein(a) [apo(a)], a homologue of the fibrinolytic proenzyme plasminogen. Several in vitro and in vivo studies have s...

The purpose of this study was to identify genetic variants associated with severe coronary artery disease (CAD). We used 3 case-control studies of white subjects whose severity of CAD was assessed by angiography. The first 2 studies were used to generate hypotheses that were then tested in the third study. We tested 12,077 putative functional singl...

Lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)] is a unique lipoprotein consisting of a low density lipoprotein (LDL)-like moiety covalently linked to apolipoprotein(a) [apo(a)]. Apo(a) is homologous to the fibrinolytic proenzyme plasminogen. Indeed, apo(a) has been shown to inhibit fibrinolysis and elevated plasma concentrations of Lp(a) are associated with an increased r...