The Effects of Simvastatin on Homing of Bone Marrow Stromal Cells to Infarcted Myocardium in Rats

Bone marrow stromal cell(BMC) is an attractive Source for myocardial repair, however, its poor homing rate to injured lesion is one of the critical limitations. Simvastatin has been interested as a pleiotrophic effects besides its cholesterol-lowering effect on cardiovascular disease. We investigated whether simvastatin and simvastatin/ezetimibe(Simvastatin/Ezetimibe) affect on BMCs' homing in myocardial ischemia/reperfusion(I/R) injury rat model. Rats were divided into three groups, and received drinking water(DW), simvastatin(1.67 mg/kg/d) or simvastatin/ezetimibe (1.67 mg/kg/d) by gastric gavage I day before I/R injury, and then continued for 7 days. I/R injury model was induced by ligation of left anterior descending coronary artery for 4 hours followed by release and conducted BMCs transplantation through tail vein injection containing 1 x 10(6) BMCs infected with firefly luciferase-encoding adenovirus. After BMCs transplantation, optical bioluminescence imaging was obtained to determine the cell homing rate. The bioluminescence was higher in both simvastatin- and simvastatin/ezetimibe groups than in DW group. Luciferase activity from left ventricle extract was higher both in simvastatin and simvastatin/ezetimibe group than in DW group. There was no significant difference between simvastatin and simvastatin/ezetimibe groups. These results suggest that simvastatin might be a useful reagent for improving homing rate of systemically administered BMCs for cardiac repair.