Bone marrow stromal cell(BMC) is an attractive source for myocardial repair, however, its poor homing rate to injured lesion is one of the critical limitations. Simvastatin has been interested as a pleiotrophic effects besides its cholesterol-lowering effect on cardiovascular disease. We investigated whether simvastatin and simvastatin/
ezetimibe(Simvastatin/Ezetimibe) affect on BMCs’ homing in myocardial schemia/reperfusion(I/R) injury rat model. Rats were divided into three groups, and received drinking water(DW), simvastatin(1.67 mg/kg/d) or simvastatin/ ezetimibe (1.67 mg/kg/d) by gastric gavage 1 day before I/R injury, and then continued for 7 days. I/R injury model was induced by ligation of left anterior descending coronary artery for 4 hours followed by release and conducted BMCs transplantation through tail vein injection containing 1×106 BMCs infected with firefly luciferaseencoding adenovirus. After BMCs transplantation, optical bioluminescence imaging was obtained to determine the
cell homing rate. The bioluminescence was higher in both simvastatin- and simvastatin/ezetimibe groups than in DW group. Luciferase activity from left ventricle extract was higher both in simvastatin and simvastatin/ezetimibe group than in DW group. There was no significant difference between simvastatin and simvastatin/ezetimibe groups.
These results suggest that simvastatin might be a useful reagent for improving homing rate of systemically administered BMCs for cardiac repair.