Generation of Adult Heart Muscle from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells

Unmet Need:
Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) are capable of becoming all types of patients’ body cells and thus, provide unprecedented opportunities for disease modeling and personalized medicine. With the capability, current cardiac regenerative medicine focuses on utilizing PSCs for modeling heart disease and cell-based interventions of cardiac repair. However, PSC derived cardiomyocytes exhibit fetal-like characteristics, and the immaturity remains a key impediment for their therapeutic applications.
 
Technical Overview:
This invention describes a platform to generate adult cardiomyocytes from human PSCs in a
microenvironment conducive to rapid maturation. The present embodiment uses young animals as hosts for PSC differentiation and has shown that PSCs differentiated in the heart.  This invention provides a novel method of generating adult cardiomyocytes from PSCs. This provides a unique opportunity for:

• Generation of patient-specific adult cardiac muscle in a short (4-6 week) turnaround time
• A platform to perform drug screening, develop disease models, and regenerative therapy
• An opportunity to predict disease onset and progression
• An opportunity to generalize this approach to research, diagnose, and treat other diseases that effect adult cell types (i.e., Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease)

 
 
Stage of Development: Pre-clinical animal models
 
Publication(s):
Antioxid Redox Signal. 2014 Nov 10; 21 (14): 2018-2031.

Category(s):