Fluorescence spectroscopy to assess apoptosis in myocardium

摘要

Apoptosis induced mitochondrial destruction and dysfunction has been shown to play an important role in the pathogenesis of both acute cardiac ischemia-reperfusion injury and chronic myocardial infarction-induced ventricular remodeling. Unfortunately this understanding has not translated into effective therapeutic strategies for either condition-mostly due to an inability to assess mitochondrial dysfunction/apoptosis effectively in humans. All current measures of apoptosis are pseudo-quantitative and require invasive tissue biopsy. Our group has developed an optical, non-tissue destructive catheter based device that allows the quantitative regional assessment of this pathological process in vivo. This instrument has been designed to acquire fluorescence signals of intrinsic mitochondrial fluorophores, Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NAD) and Flavoprotein (FP). The normalized ratio of these fluorophores (FP/FP+NADH) called the redox ratio, is an indicator of the in vivo mitochondrial dysfunction. We have demonstrated in a rabbit reperfusion model of apoptotic myocyte injury that this redox ratio is drastically increased which is consistent with profound apoptosis-induced "unhinging" of the mitochondrial respiratory function.