Direct gene transfer and expression into rat heart in vivo.

We found previously that genes injected into skeletal muscle can be taken up by myofibers and expressed. In the present study we found that myocardial cells can also express a variety of reporter genes injected into myocardium as efficiently as skeletal myofibers, while the cells of several other tissues cannot. The inability of tissues other than striated muscle to express injected DNA is not due to technical difficulties of injection because injected DNA was detected in these other tissues by PCR analysis. These results suggest that skeletal and cardiac muscle cells have unique features such as T tubules that may play a critical role in DNA uptake. Expression in cardiac muscle was stable for only two weeks, possibly because of an immune response against the transfected cells. The ability to directly transfer genes into myocardial cells raises the possibility of gene therapy for both acquired and genetic heart diseases.