Cardiac tissue engineering is an interdisciplinary field that engineers modulation of viable molecular milieu to restore, maintain or improve heart function. Myocardial workload (energy demand) and energy substrate availability (supply) are in continual flux to maintain specialized cellular processes, yet the heart has a limited capacity for substrate storage and utilization during pathophysiological conditions. Damage to heart muscle, acute or chronic, leads to dysregulation of cardiac metabolic processes associated with gradual but progressive decline in mitochondrial respiratory pathways resulting in diminished ATP production. The Peroxisome Proliferator Activated Receptor Alpha (
PPARα
) is known to regulate fatty acid to glucose metabolic balance as well as mitochondrial structural integrity. In this study, a non-canonical pathway of PPARα was analyzed by cardiomyocyte targeted
PPARα
overexpression during cardiac hypertrophy that showed significant downregulation in p53 acetylation as well as GSK3β activation levels. Targeted
PPARα
overexpression during hypertrophy resulted in restoration of mitochondrial structure and function along with significantly improved mitochondrial ROS generation and membrane potential. This is the first report of myocyte targeted
PPARα
overexpression in hypertrophied myocardium that results in an engineered heart with significantly improved function with increased muscle mitochondrial endurance and reduced mitochondrial apoptotic load, thus conferring a greater resistance to pathological stimuli within cardiac microenvironment.
Interaction of the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha with the retinoid X receptor alpha unmasks a cryptic peroxisome proliferator response element that overlaps an ARP-1-binding site in the CYP4A6 promoter.
