The field of regenerative medicine holds tremendous promise for the treatment of chronic diseases. While the adult mammalian heart has limited regenerative capacity, previous studies have focused on cellular therapeutic strategies in an attempt to …

Systemic amyloid light-chain (AL) amyloidosis is associated with rapidly progressive and fatal cardiomyopathy resulting from the direct cardiotoxic effects of circulating AL light chain (AL-LC) proteins and the indirect effects of AL fibril tissue …

There are increasing needs to develop imaging techniques to study in vivo vascular morphology and function in various mouse models of atherosclerosis. Using ultrasound biomicroscopy (UBM), we developed and validated a new imaging protocol to follow lesion …

Atherosclerosis is closely associated with disturbed flow characterized by low and oscillatory shear stress, but studies directly linking disturbed flow to atherogenesis is lacking. The major reason for this has been a lack of an animal model in which …

Copy number variation (CNV) has been associated increasingly with altered susceptibility to human disease. Large CNVs are likely to incur disease risk or resilience via predictable changes in gene dosage that are relatively straightforward to model using …

Photoacoustic imaging is a promising new technology that combines tissue optical characteristics with ultrasound transmission and can potentially visualize tumor depth in bladder cancer. We imaged simulated tumors in 5 fresh porcine bladders with …

BACKGROUND: The proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) promotes independently of its enzymatic activity the degradation of the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor. PCSK9 gain of function in humans leads to autosomal dominant …

We studied prospectively whether atherosclerotic progression in apolipoprotein-E knock- out mice could be noninvasively and accurately measured by use of high-resolution ultra- sonographic biomicroscopy. We examined the correlation between the …

This study was aimed to test the hypothesis that noninvasive assessment of carotid plaques can be achieved by high-resolution micro-ultrasound imaging in apolipoprotein-E knockout (apoE-KO) mice. Forty-two male apoE-KO mice were fed a high-fat diet and …

Considerable evidence supports that the CD4(+) T cell-mediated immune response contributes to the development of atherosclerotic plaque. However, the effects of Th17 cells on atherosclerosis are not thoroughly understood. In this study, we evaluated the …