Abstract
Hemorrhagic stroke is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Secondary mechanisms of brain injury adversely affect functional outcome in patients after intracranial hemorrhage. Potential drivers of intracranial hemorrhage-related secondary brain injury are hemoglobin and its downstream degradation products released from lysed red blood cells, such as free heme. We established a mouse model with stereotactic striatal injection of heme-albumin to gain insights into the toxicity mechanisms of free heme in the brain and assess the therapeutic potential of heme binding and biochemical neutralization by hemopexin. We defined the dose-dependent transcriptional effect of heme or heme-hemopexin exposure 24 h after injection by spatial transcriptome analysis of lesion-centered coronal cryosections. The spatial transcriptome was interpreted in a multimodal approach along with histology, magnetic resonance imaging, and behavioral data and reported in the associated research article "Spatial transcriptome analysis defines heme as a hemopexin-targetable inflammatoxin in the brain" [1]. The spatially resolved transcriptome dataset made available here is intended for continued analysis of free heme toxicity in the brain, which is of potential pathophysiological and therapeutic significance in the context of a wide range of neurovascular and neurodegenerative diseases.