Noncoronary collateral circulation (NCCC) comes to the heart from mediastinal, bronchial, and pericardial channels. Whether NCCC can somehow be augmented to provide an alternative therapy for ischemic patients is an intriguing hypothesis with no clear answer yet due to the challenging nature of this research field. Based on several aspects, such as (1) the occurrence of natural collaterals between coronary and the internal thoracic arteries (ITAs), (2) the potentialhemodynamic effects of ITAs ligation, (3) the potential of ITAs for developing important collateral branches, and (4) the current availability of angiogenic growth factors, the hypothesis herein is that enhancement of NCCC may represent an alternative myocardial blood supply strategy, and that combining ITAs occlusion with angiogenic growth factors may represent a way to achieve this objective. We established an ischemic canine model for first experiment.
