Innovative Animal Models of Cardiac Remodeling: Development and Evaluation

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Guest Editors

Feng Hua Yang

Guangdong Laboratory Animals Monitoring Institute,Cardiovascular model research group, China

Dr. Feng Hua Yang is an associate professor, the head of the Cardiovascular Model Research Group, and a member of the Academic Committee of the Guangdong Laboratory Animals Monitoring Institute, Guangzhou, China. She received a Masters and PhD in biomedical sciences focused on cardiac biology from University of Guelph, Canada, and completed her post-doctoral training at University of Alberta and University of Toronto. Dr. Yang’s primary research interest is to investigate the molecular mechanism underlying the progression of cardiac remodeling and heart failure. She is committed to developing innovative animal models and introducing precise evaluation methods of the models for cardiovascular research. She holds 10 patents and has won Guangdong Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award (2nd Class), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Graduate Scholarship, and Ontario Graduate Scholarship. She is a member of the editorial board of Acta Laboratorium Animalis Scientia Sinica, a reviewer of several peer-reviewed scientific journals, and a moderator of several cardiovascular conferences.

W. Glen Pyle

University of Guelph,Department of Biomedical Sciences and IMPART, Dalhousie Medicine, Canada

Dr. Glen Pyle is a professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Guelph and an associate member of IMPART at Dalhousie Medicine. Dr. Pyle received his PhD in Physiology and Biophysics from the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center and completed an American Heart Association Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago. His research focuses on the molecular basis of heart failure, with interests in molecular therapeutics, sex differences, and women’s heart health. Dr. Pyle’s lab is supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada (HSFC). Dr. Pyle is an HSFC/Health Canada Senior Career Investigator for Women’s Heart and Brain Health. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology, American Journal of Physiology, and Biomolecules.

Yihua Bei

Shanghai University,Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, School of Life Science,Cardiac Regeneration and Ageing Lab,China

Dr. Yihua Bei is a professor in the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences at Shanghai University, Shanghai, China. She received her PhD degree from Paris Descartes University, France in 2013. She then came to Shanghai and has been working in Cardiac Regeneration and Ageing Lab, Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences in Shanghai University. Her research is focused on cardiomyocyte fate regulation, including inhibition of cardiomyocyte apoptosis, senescence and pathological hypertrophy and promotion of healthy hypertrophy, thus elucidating the mechanisms responsible for myocardial protection and identifying therapeutic targets for heart failure. As the first/co-first author, she has published in Circulation, BMC Med, J Mol Cell Cardiol, Mol Ther Nucleic Acids, etc. She is invited on the editorial board of Journal of Cardiovascular Translational Research and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine.

Collection Overview

Cardiac remodeling occurs after myocardial infarction, mechanical overload, inflammatory heart disease, or congenital dilated cardiomyopathy, and can also be induced by physiological exercise and pregnancy. In the progression of cardiac remodeling, the heart may display systolic or diastolic dysfunction, arrhythmias, ventricular wall hypertrophy, atrial or ventricular dilation, scar formation, vascular abnormalities, fibrosis, inflammation, metabolic disorder, and cellular and molecular alterations. Animal models play a crucial role in exploring therapeutic intervention strategies for attenuating and reversing cardiac remodeling. Surgical/physical procedures, chemicals, diet, and genetic engineering are effective strategies for inducing cardiac remodeling in small and large animals. To precisely evaluate the phenotype of cardiac remodeling, MRI, echocardiography, electrophysiological measurement, optical mapping, histology, high-throughput technologies, and biochemical assays are applied. The goal of this collection is to provide novel or modified protocols to develop animal models of cardiac remodeling, and to demonstrate innovative or systematic model evaluation methods.