Useful applications of growth factors for cardiovascular regenerative medicine

Abstract

Novel advances for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) include regenerative approaches for fibrosis, hypertrophy, and neoangiogenesis. Studies indicate that growth factor (GF) signaling could promote heart repair since most of the evidence is derived from preclinical models. Observational studies have evaluated GF serum/plasma levels as feasible biomarkers for risk stratification of CVDs. Noteworthy, two clinical interventional published studies showed that the administration of growth factors (GFs) induced beneficial effect on left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), myocardial perfusion, end-systolic volume index (ESVI). To date, large scale ongoing studies are in Phase I-II and mostly focussed on intramyocardial (IM), intracoronary (IC) or intravenous (IV) administration of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and fibroblast growth factor-23 (FGF-23) which result in the most investigated GFs in the last 10 years. Future data of ongoing randomized controlled studies will be crucial in understanding whether GF-based protocols could be in a concrete way effective in the clinical setting.

Keywords:

• Growth factors
• vascular endothelial growth factors
• fibroblast growth factor
• heart failure
• cardiovascular diseases

Author contributions

MRDP and NDM wrote the manuscript, Figures and Tables and MV and CN critically reviewed the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

NDM is funded by an IRCCS SDN clinical research fellowship. CN is funded by a Ricerca Corrente 2018 (Ministero della Salute [Italian Ministery of Health], Rome, Italy].