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TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT

Iron Particles for Noninvasive Monitoring of Bone Marrow Stromal Cell Engraftment into, and Isolation of Viable Engrafted Donor Cells from, the Heart

^aCardiac Metabolism Research Group, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom;
^bStem Cell Research Laboratory, National Blood Service, Oxford Centre, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, United Kingdom;
^cNuffield Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom;
^dNational Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College School of Science, Technology and Medicine, London, United Kingdom

Key Words. Magnetic resonance imaging • Stem cell • Iron • Infarct • Heart

Correspondence: Carolyn Carr, M.A., D.Phil., Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, Sherrington Building, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, U.K., OX1 3PT. Telephone: 01865-282247; Fax: 01865-282272; e-mail: Carolyn.Carr{at}physiol.ox.ac.uk

Received February 6, 2006; accepted for publication April 12, 2006.
First published online in STEM CELLS EXPRESS   April 20, 2006.



Stem cells offer a promising approach to the treatment of myocardial infarction and prevention of heart failure. We have used iron labeling of bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) to noninvasively track cell location in the infarcted rat heart over 16 weeks using cine-magnetic resonance imaging (cine-MRI) and to isolate the BMSCs from the grafted hearts using the magnetic properties of the donor cells. BMSCs were isolated from rat bone marrow, characterized by flow cytometry, transduced with lentiviral vectors expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP), and labeled with iron particles. BMSCs were injected into the infarct periphery immediately following coronary artery ligation, and rat hearts were imaged at 1, 4, 10, and 16 weeks postinfarction. Signal voids caused by the iron particles in the BMSCs were detected in all rats at all time points. In mildly infarcted hearts, the volume of the signal void decreased over the 16 weeks, whereas the signal void volume did not decrease significantly in severely infarcted hearts. High-resolution three-dimensional magnetic resonance (MR) microscopy identified hypointense regions at the same position as in vivo. Donor cells containing iron particles and expressing GFP were identified in MR-targeted heart sections after magnetic cell separation from digested hearts. In conclusion, MRI can be used to track cells labeled with iron particles in damaged tissue for at least 16 weeks after injection and to guide tissue sectioning by accurately identifying regions of cell engraftment. The magnetic properties of the iron-labeled donor cells can be used for their isolation from host tissue to enable further characterization.

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