Nitroglycerin Personal Statement

Personal Statement

“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well-used brings happy death”, quoted from Leonardo da Vinci’s will, is my motto since I entered the Second Military Medical University. His remark always reminds me to live life to the fullest and engage in basic medical research which has fascinated me a lot since I was a little child. When I was only 6 years old, my father, a researcher in molecular biology, often brought me to his laboratory and I was deeply impressed by the advanced equipment which aroused my curiosity. After having grown up, I was always touched by my father’s attitude towards research because he often stayed up late at night in the lab even though he had already been a chief director of the department.

After that, I read lots of background materials about nitroglycerin and I noticed that nitric oxide is the effective constituent of nitroglycerin. Nitric oxide, a simple nitrogen oxide gas, plays a vital role in cardio-protection. From my point of view, some other kinds of gas might also have the same effect and methane, the simplest alkane, came into my thought. Methane, the most common organic gas in the atmosphere, can be synthesized biologically and a recent study showed that methane could confer protective effects on oxidative stress and inflammation in ischemic and reperfusion-induced intestinal injury. So it was meaningful for us to investigate the myocardial protective effects of methane. At that time, I got in touch with Prof. Xuejun Sun coincidently who had focused on medical gas research for more than 5 years and he offered me a chance to explore the cardio-protection of methane. It proved to be a really important start for me to pursue my dream of getting in basic medical research and curing more and more

It was difficult for me to explore the certain molecular mechanism of methane’s protection alone, so I chose to focus on the hydrogen which had been studied for nearly ten years. Even though previous studies showed that hydrogen protects against myocardial ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury in rats, the effects of high-concentration hydrogen gas (HCH) on myocardial I/R injury remain unclear and the mechanism underlying this protection should be explored. In this study, I tried to explain the vital role of the specific protein in the pathway of hydrogen cardioprotection. In this study, firstly, we examined several traditional protective pathways in HCH treated mice and PI3K-Akt signaling pathway is the most relevant one. In addition, pretreatment with pharmacological inhibitors of PI3K (LY294002 and wortmannin) abrogated the cardioprotective effects of HCH in mice with I/R injury, which demonstrated that PI3K/Akt pathway mediates the cardioprotective effects of HCH in myocardial I/R injuries. We observed the results in the present study that the phosphorylation level of GSK-3β was significantly up-regulated by hydrogen, which has a high correlation of Akt1 phosphorylation. In vivo and cultured neonatal mouse cardiomyocytes experiments were conducted to reveal the important role of Akt1 during the hydrogen treatment with the application of pharmacological inhibitors. In the process of this