A pathway to precision medicine: coronary and cerebral arterial transcriptomic analysis reveals distinct pathophysiological adaptations in two clinically relevant porcine models of heart failure

Abstract

Traditional treatments for heart failure (HF) with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) are ineffective at treating HF with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), establishing a need for more targeted therapeutic approaches. To date, the comparative vascular adaptions induced by these two distinct forms of HF have been largely unexplored. Therefore, the objective of this study was to compare HFrEF and HFpEF pathophysiological adaptions in both coronary and cerebral microvasculature in two clinically relevant swine models of HF. We hypothesized that HFrEF and HFpEF will induce differing pathophysiological adaptations within the microvasculature of the heart as well as peripheral tissues, such as the brain. Intact female Ossabaw swine (2 months old) were fed a Western Diet for 4 months to develop metabolic syndrome (HOMA-IR: HFrEF 2.94 ± 0.34; HFpEF 2.95 ± 0.59). At 6 months of age, animals were either subjected to 90 minutes ischemia followed by reperfusion (I/R) to induce a myocardial infarction (MI) recapitulating cardiometabolic HFrEF (38.0 ± 3.9% EF) or were aortic banded to induce pressure-overload with relevance to cardiometabolic HFpEF (61.5 ± 1.7% EF). Following humane euthanasia, coronary arterioles (139.5 ± 4.9 μm inner diameter) and middle cerebral artery second order pial arterioles (281.1 ± 16.7 μm) from each model were dissected and either cannulated and pressurized for myography experiments or flash frozen for RNA isolation, sequencing, and predictive pathway analysis. Smooth muscle dependent U46619 (thromboxane A2 agonist)-induced constriction of cerebral arterioles was not different between groups (HFrEF 46.9 ± 10.3%; HFpEF 50.7 ± 4.8%), however, smooth muscle dependent dilation to sodium nitroprusside (SNP, nitric oxide mimetic) was significantly reduced in HFrEF (37.1 ± 14.0%) compared to HFpEF (83.6 ± 4.6%), suggesting the dilatory capacity of peripheral vessels is impaired when EF% is reduced. Furthermore, RNA-sequencing comparison between HFrEF and HFpEF uncovered 35 differentially expressed genes in the coronary (n=3) and 23 differentially expressed genes in cerebral (n=3) arterioles (q ≤ 0.1). Ingenuity pathway analysis predicted upstream regulators that code for angiotensinogen, STAT3, and interferon-Ƴ were inhibited (z-score > -2.0) in the HFrEF model, which was associated with decreased proliferation of smooth muscle cells and vasculogenesis with increased organismal death and inflammation in the coronary arterioles. Furthermore, analysis of the cerebral arterioles predicted inhibition of angiotensinogen (z-score > -2.0) in the HFrEF model which was associated with increased fibroblast cell death, dedifferentiation of smooth muscle cells, and recruitment of macrophages. Together, these data reveal distinct pathophysiological functional and transcriptomic adaptions between HFrEF and HFpEF in the coronary and cerebral arterioles. Additionally, these data provide three candidate genes that regulate these pathophysiological processes and could be targeted for potential therapeutic intervention. Funding: REGENCOR and Department of Defense (DOD) W81XWH-18-1-0179. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.