Project Details
Projekt
Role of Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) in post-traumatic cardiac dysfunction – Systemic and paracrine Effects of EVs on Cardiomyocytes (CM)
Applicants
Professor Dr. Gernot Marx; Dr. Birte Weber
Subject Area
Orthopaedics, Traumatology, Reconstructive Surgery
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465409392
The FA-1 project will focus on the role of EVs in post-traumatic cardiac dysfunction. The project will be carried out in close collaboration between the Department of Trauma Surgery and Orthopedics of the University Hospital Frankfurt and the Department of Intensive Care Medicine and Intermediate Care of the RWTH University Hospital Aachen. To increase the number of enrolled patients, transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) measurements will be established at the ICU at Aachen and proceeded at both clinics as part of a multicentre approach. Detailed measurement of cardiac damage markers, like troponin t, will be combined with TTE measurements of severely injured patients. The aim of this multicentre approach is to work out whether TTE is superior to measurements of cardiac damage markers in diagnosing post-traumatic cardiac dysfunction after polytrauma. In a second step we further want to go into details of cardiomyocyte damage development due systemic polytrauma-derived EVs. One mechanism which should be a focus in this project will be the activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome due polytrauma-EVs. Further promoters of cardiomyocyte damage in the cargo of PT-EVs will be analyzed using next-generation sequencing (miRNA) and proteomics. In the third part of the project, we will analyze if and to what extent the cell-to-cell communication between cardiomyocytes, cardiac fibroblasts and cardiac endothelial cells influence polytrauma-damaged cardiomyocytes in-vitro. In this context especially the role of cell-specific (cardiomyocyte, cardiac fibroblasts and cardiac endothelial) EVs will be investigated in detail. At least the results should be compared with heart-tissue EVs from a murine/pig polytrauma model by mean of cargo content and cellular origin.
DFG Programme
Research Units
