Ischemic heart disease remains as the leading cause of mortality in the United States. Transplantation of cardiac stem cells (CSCs) is emerging as a potentially transformative strategy to regenerate new cardiomyocytes and repair the damage to the heart due to ischemic/reperfusion injury. However, the major obstacle for stem cell therapy is the severely poor survival of donor cells because over 90% of stem cells disappear within 7 days of transplantation. Therefore, the long-term goal of my laboratory is to explore the therapeutic strategies of enhancing cardiac stem cell survival and homing for heart infarct repair. Preconditioning CSCs with anti-apoptotic small molecules is an alternative way to improve the stem cell survival for increasing the efficacy of transplantation. Among them, carbon monoxide (CO), a byproduct of heme oxygenase 1 (HO-1), has potent prosurvival effects. Cobalt protoporphyrin (CoPP) is a well-known HO-1 inducer and has been used to promote CO generation and protect cardiomyocytes from ischemia/reperfusion injury.