Dr. Carolyn Lam:               Welcome to "Circulation On The Run", your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr. Carolyn Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. Today's feature paper looks at the early use of N-Acetyl Cysteine with nitrate therapy in patients undergoing primary PCI for STEMI. More soon right after this week's summary of original articles.                                                 The first paper identifies a novel association between Phosphatidyl Choline Transfer Protein, or PCTP expression, in the blood, and death or myocardial infarction in patients with cardiovascular disease. Now, PCTP regulates intermembrane transfer for phosphatidyl choline. Platelet PCTP expression has been shown to be associated with increased platelet responses upon activation of protease-activated receptor four thrombin receptors. In today's paper, first authors Dr. Mao and Songdej, corresponding author Doctor Rao, and colleagues from the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia used DNA protein binding studies and human erythroleukemia cells, as well as luciferase reporter studies to show that PCTP is a direct transcriptional target of RUNX1, a major hematopoietic transcription factor that regulates platelet production and function. Furthermore, in 587 patients with cardiovascular disease, the authors showed that PCTP expression in the blood correlated with RUNX1 expression and was independently associated with future death or myocardial infarction. Thus, regulation of PCTP by transcription factor RUNX1 may play a role in the pathogenesis of platelet-mediated cardiovascular events.                                                 The next paper provides molecular insights into cardiac fibrosis and shows that bone marrow cells are involved in cardiac fibrosis during pathological stress. Drs. Kishore, Verma and colleagues from Lewis Katz School of Medicine and Temple University of Philadelphia hypothesize that interleukin-10 inhibits pressure overload-induced homing of bone marrow fibroblast progenitor cells to the heart, and inhibits their trans-differentiation to myofibroblasts, thus attenuating cardiac fibrosis. To test this hypothesis, the authors used pressure-overload in wild-type and interleukin-10 knockout mice by transverse aortic constriction, and used chimeric mice to determine bone marrow origin. They further isolated fibroblast progenitor cells from mouse bone marrow for mechanistic studies.                                                 They found that, in addition to resident cardiac fibroblasts, bone marrow-derived fibroblasts significantly contributed to progression of pathological cardiac fibrosis, and that pliotropic antiinflammatory interleukin-10 inhibited the recruitment and trans-differentiation of bone marrow fibroblast progenitor cells in the pressure-overloaded myocardium. At a molecular level, they showed that interleukin-10 inhibited TGFβ SMAD2-3 signaling in activated bone marrow fibroblast progenitor cells. Furthermore, inhibition of TGFβ SMAD2-3 signaling mediated micro-RNA21 maturation was a novel mechanism by which interleukin-10 inhibited bone marrow progenitor cells-mediated cardiac fibrosis. Thus, selective inhibition of bone marrow cells homing to the heart and of fibrotic signaling using interleukin-10 or selective RNAs might inhibit the transition of physiological hypertrophy to heart failure, and may be a potential therapeutic target to treat or prevent the development of hypertrophic remodeling.                                                 The next study looks at the risk of major bleeding in patients receiving ticagrelor compared to Aspirin after a TIA or Acute Ischemic Stroke in the SOCRATES study. As a reminder, the SOCRATES trial was the first outcome study with ticagrelor in patients with Acute Ischemic Stroke or TIA, who were given ninety days of monotherapy with tica