Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells for Cardiovascular Disease Modeling

Stanford University, Stanford CA

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The successful derivation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) from somatic cells offers significant potential to overcome obstacles in the field of cardiovascular disease. hiPSC-derived cardiac cells can now provide incredible potential for disease modeling in vitro and regenerative medicine therapies in vivo. Recently, several exciting demonstrations of the disease modeling capability of hiPSC- derived cardiac cells have been published (e.g., Timothy syndrome, LEOPARD syndrome). These patient-specific hiPSC-CMs have been found to recapitulate the disease phenotypes. In contrast to Timothy and LEOPARD syndrome (which are considered orphan diseases), familial dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is the most common cause of heart failure and hence places a tremendous burden on the healthcare system in the US and worldwide. Here we seek to derive hiPSCs from patients with familial dilated cardiomyopathy (Aim 1), determine the phenotype of hiPSC-cardiac cells from DCM patients versus healthy controls (Aim 2), and evaluate their functionality after genetic rescue using homologous recombination (Aim 3). We believe the findings here should have broad clinical and scientific impact toward better understanding on the molecular and cellular basis of DCM.