Author Description

This dissertation, "The Fate of Undifferentiated Murine Embryonic Stem Cells in a Mouse Model With Acute Myocardial Infarction" by Chun-wai, Wong,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled The Fate of Undifferentiated Murine Embryonic Stem Cells in a Mouse Model with Acute Myocardial Infarction Submitted by Wong Chun Wai for the degree of Master of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in August 2005 Myocardial infarction (MI) due to coronary artery diseases causes irreversible loss of heart muscle and is the leading cause of heart failure in developed countries. For patients with end-stage heart failure, current pharmacological and interventional treatments are only palliative and the option of heart transplantation is limited by the availability of donor organs. Embryonic stem (ES) cells, derived from the inner cell mass of blastocysts, can propagate indefinitely in culture to serve as an unlimited cell source and maintain their pluripotency to differentiate into all cell types, including cardiomyocyte. However, the signals that stimulate cardiac differentiation of injected ES cells in vivo under such pathophysiological environments remain unclear. To address this question, we investigated the in vitro and in vivo cardiac fate of ES cells under normal and pathophysiological conditions. Our experiments indicated that ES cells have distinct fates in normal and infarcted hearts. Transplantation of undifferentiated ES cells into normal hearts of syngeneic and allogeneic mice did not induce teratoma formation but resulted in limited engraftment of ES cel