There are several small and large animal models of ischemic heart failure.These techniques create infarctions by mechanical disruption of blood flow but lack the biomass of thrombus that occurs in plaque rupture that we see clinically.We have recently developed a sheep model of HF using intra-circumflex arterial injection of particles.HF was confirmed by echo-based assessment of ejection fraction (EF) and increased plasma troponin levels.Plasma BNP levels were in close correlation with the progression of HF.Analysis of control and embolized sheep heart tissue revealed that the expression of BNP and MCP-1 genes were elevated significantly as compared to tissues from control sheep in the infarcted regions of left ventricular tissue.The non-infarcted left ventricular regions of the embolized sheep showed less remarkable increases in the early time period (72 hr.) but showed greater increases after 90 days.