Development Of A Nonclinical Model For The Assessment Of Oncology Therapy-Induced Cardiomyopathy

With the increasing number of people surviving cancer, patients and doctors are becoming equally focused on the quality of life in survivorship as they are on fighting cancer. Consequently, cardio-oncology has emerged as a new clinical discipline with focus on both the stratification of patients at risk and therapies that pose a cardiovascular risk, eg molecularly targeted therapies including tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI). Therefore, nonclinical research should strive not only to detect preclinical drug-induced changes in cardiac structure or function, but also to understand the relevance of these cardiotoxic effects to humans. As is typical for new disciplines, there is an unmet need for early and predictive tools to identify both of these factors. Currently, preclinical assessment of cardiovascular toxicity consists of repeat-dose in vivo toxicity studies focused primarily on histopathological endpoints; additional measures, such as cardiac function and biomarkers of cardiac injury, are not routinely assessed in these studies. Furthermore, analysis of these studies suggests that using young and healthy, drug-naive animals do not adequately translate the TKI-induced cardiomyopathy phenotype; therefore, new nonclinical models are needed to address this gap. The developed model would ideally be used to assess the preclinical cardiotoxicity of proposed oncology therapies, but may also have utility in assessing cardioprotective therapies for use in cardio-oncology. This poster will propose a new model for studying cardio-oncology nonclinically that includes myocardial transcriptional signatures, strain echocardiography imaging, and pharmacologic (dobutamine) stress challenge. In general, rats with radiotelemetry were treated with vehicle or low dose doxorubicin (2 mg/kg/week IP) for 1 month. Cardiac structure and function at rest and during stress were assessed using strain echocardiography in concert with a weekly dobutamine infusion. Circulating blood biomarkers of cardiac toxicity (eg, NTproBNP, NTproANP, cTropin, and miR-208) were collected weekly and at necropsy. At the end of the study, samples of cardiac tissue were taken from the ventricular apex and were submitted for transcriptional profiling along with standard histopathology. These data as well as recent publications give high confidence in developing a rodent model predictive of drug-induced cardiomyopathy. Citation Format: Michelle Hemkens, Samantha Cardenas, Jessica Frey, Brad Hirakawa, Petra Koza-Taylor, Jianying Wang, Paul Butler. Development of a nonclinical model for the assessment of oncology therapy-induced cardiomyopathy. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 107th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2016 Apr 16-20; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2016;76(14 Suppl):Abstract nr LB-203.