Advances in injectable hydrogels for radiation-induced heart disease

Abstract

Radiological heart damage (RIHD) is damage caused by unavoidable irradiation of the heart during chest radiotherapy, with a long latency period and a progressively increasing proportion of delayed cardiac damage due to conventional doses of chest radiotherapy. There is a risk of inducing diseases such as acute/chronic pericarditis, myocarditis, delayed myocardial fibrosis and damage to the cardiac conduction system in humans, which can lead to myocardial infarction or even death in severe cases. This paper details the pathogenesis of RIHD and gives potential targets for treatment at the molecular and cellular level, avoiding the drawbacks of high invasiveness and immune rejection due to drug therapy, medical device implantation and heart transplantation. Injectable hydrogel therapy has emerged as a minimally invasive tissue engineering therapy to provide necessary mechanical support to the infarcted myocardium and to act as a carrier for various bioactive factors and cells to improve the cellular microenvironment in the infarcted area and induce myocardial tissue regeneration. Therefore, this paper combines bioactive factors and cellular therapeutic mechanisms with injectable hydrogels, presents recent advances in the treatment of cardiac injury after RIHD with different injectable gels, and summarizes the therapeutic potential of various types of injectable hydrogels as a potential solution.

Keywords:

• Radiation-induced heart disease
• injectable hydrogels
• stem cell
• tissue regeneration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China Project [12002232, 12272251, 31870934,82171988] and Graduate Student Research Innovation Program in Shanxi Province [RC2300003332] and General Project Basic Research Program of Shanxi Province [202103021223100] and Open Research Fund Program of Collaborative Innovation Center for Molecular Imaging of PrecisioMedicine [2020-ZD02].