Rosuvastatin

An atherosclerotic mouse model was induced in male ApoE^–/– mice that were fed with a high-fat diet for 12 weeks. After 12 weeks, three mice were randomly selected to examine the formation of plaque in artery. All the mice were divided into five groups: C57BL/6J+general diet (n = 11), ApoE^–/–+general diet (n = 11), C57BL/6J+high-fat diet (n = 13), ApoE^–/–+high-fat diet (n = 13), and ApoE^–/–+high-fat diet+Rosu (n = 13). After 12 weeks, the drug treatment group (ApoE^–/–+high-fat diet+Rosu) received an intragastric administration of 5 mg/kg/day rosuvastatin (MedChemExpress, United States) according to the previous protocol (Calkin et al., 2008 (link)) for 4 weeks, while other mice received the same amount of saline solution. After 4 weeks, all the mice were anesthetized with 10% hydrated chlorine aldehyde.

HUVECs were obtained from the BeNa Culture Collection (Beijing, China). The cells were cultured in Dulbecco’s modified Eagle’s Medium (DMEM) supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum (Gibco, United States), streptomycin (100 μg/ml), and penicillin (100 IU/ml) in a humidified atmosphere containing 5% CO₂/95% air at 37°C. The culture medium was replaced every 2 days.
In the experiment, HUVECs were pretreated with rosuvastatin (MedChemExpress, United States; 2.5, 5, and 10 μM) for 2 h. The concentrations were determined prior to the experiment with a drug concentration gradient (Wang et al., 2010 (link)). rosuvastatin was dissolved at a certain concentration in dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) (Piconi et al., 2008 (link)); the final concentration of DMSO was always lower than 0.01%, which had been shown to have no effect on cell viability (Gao et al., 2008 (link)). The cells were then exposed to H₂O₂ (750 μM) for 24 h (Chen et al., 2014 (link)). The final concentrations of H₂O₂ were determined by the experiment with a H₂O₂ concentration gradient.