Cell culture from rat skeletal muscles to be used for cellular therapy of ischemic heart disease

When treating ischemic heart disease, surgery and drug therapy can be efficiently complemented with cellular therapy. At present, various cell types (embryonic stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells, regional cardiac stem cells, etc.) are studied and the conditions for their generation, cultivation and delivery to the organism are compared to choose the best possible strategy of cellular treatment. Skeletal muscle myoblasts, progenitor cells of myocytes are considered as a promising material for transplantation into periinfarction tissue. The advantage of these cells lies in the fact that they are easy to be obtained from a donor and that they are capable of differentiating in contractile cells which can improve the myocardial contractile function when engineered in peri-infarction tissue. The study looks at a protocol of deriving cell cultures from rat skeletal muscles and their potential for cardiac myogenic differentiation. Also studied is the impact of a type of culture surface upon the derived cell phenotype.