Evaluation of safety and efficacy of adipose-derived stem cells in rat myocardial infarction model using hexadecyl-4-[124I]iodobenzoate for cell tracking

•There was no significant alteration of gene expression in [124I]HIB-labeled ADSCs.•ADSCs therapy using radioisotope (124I) attenuated cardiac remodeling by MI.•Angiogenesis and cardiac related genes are up-regulated by ADSC therapy in MI.•Iodine-124 has no adverse events for safety and therapeutic potential of ADSCs in MI.

This study was aimed to evaluate the effect of 124I-labeling with hexadecyl-4-iodobenzoate (HIB) on gene expression related to cell cycle, DNA repair, transcription, proliferation and differentiation of adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs). [124I]HIB showed high labeling efficiency with ADSCs (51.3±1.3%, 0.3–2.0 Bq/cell) and there is no morphological change of ADSCs. In the microarray analysis of gene expression pattern, differences were not observed between non-labeled and [124I]HIB-labeled ADSCs. We demonstrated that 124I-labeling with HIB did not affect the biological properties of ADSCs.