Cell Reports (Jan 2017)

Neonatal Transplantation Confers Maturation of PSC-Derived Cardiomyocytes Conducive to Modeling Cardiomyopathy

  • Gun-Sik Cho,
  • Dong I. Lee,
  • Emmanouil Tampakakis,
  • Sean Murphy,
  • Peter Andersen,
  • Hideki Uosaki,
  • Stephen Chelko,
  • Khalid Chakir,
  • Ingie Hong,
  • Kinya Seo,
  • Huei-Sheng Vincent Chen,
  • Xiongwen Chen,
  • Cristina Basso,
  • Steven R. Houser,
  • Gordon F. Tomaselli,
  • Brian O’Rourke,
  • Daniel P. Judge,
  • David A. Kass,
  • Chulan Kwon

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 18, no. 2
pp. 571 – 582

Abstract

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Summary: Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) offer unprecedented opportunities for disease modeling and personalized medicine. However, PSC-derived cells exhibit fetal-like characteristics and remain immature in a dish. This has emerged as a major obstacle for their application for late-onset diseases. We previously showed that there is a neonatal arrest of long-term cultured PSC-derived cardiomyocytes (PSC-CMs). Here, we demonstrate that PSC-CMs mature into adult CMs when transplanted into neonatal hearts. PSC-CMs became similar to adult CMs in morphology, structure, and function within a month of transplantation into rats. The similarity was further supported by single-cell RNA-sequencing analysis. Moreover, this in vivo maturation allowed patient-derived PSC-CMs to reveal the disease phenotype of arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, which manifests predominantly in adults. This study lays a foundation for understanding human CM maturation and pathogenesis and can be instrumental in PSC-based modeling of adult heart diseases. : Pluripotent stem cell (PSC)-derived cells remain fetal like, and this has become a major impediment to modeling adult diseases. Cho et al. find that PSC-derived cardiomyocytes mature into adult cardiomyocytes when transplanted into neonatal rat hearts. This method can serve as a tool to understand maturation and pathogenesis in human cardiomyocytes. Keywords: cardiomyocyte, maturation, iPS, cardiac progenitor, neonatal, disease modeling, cardiomyopathy, ARVC, T-tubule, calcium transient, sarcomere shortening