Dataset Information

A universal system for highly efficient cardiac differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells that eliminates interline variability.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The production of cardiomyocytes from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) holds great promise for patient-specific cardiotoxicity drug testing, disease modeling, and cardiac regeneration. However, existing protocols for the differentiation of hiPSC to the cardiac lineage are inefficient and highly variable. We describe a highly efficient system for differentiation of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) and hiPSC to the cardiac lineage. This system eliminated the variability in cardiac differentiation capacity of a variety of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC), including hiPSC generated from CD34(+) cord blood using non-viral, non-integrating methods.

Methodology/principal findings

We systematically and rigorously optimized >45 experimental variables to develop a universal cardiac differentiation system that produced contracting human embryoid bodies (hEB) with an improved efficiency of 94.7±2.4% in an accelerated nine days from four hESC and seven hiPSC lines tested, including hiPSC derived from neonatal CD34(+) cord blood and adult fibroblasts using non-integrating episomal plasmids. This cost-effective differentiation method employed forced aggregation hEB formation in a chemically defined medium, along with staged exposure to physiological (5%) oxygen, and optimized concentrations of mesodermal morphogens BMP4 and FGF2, polyvinyl alcohol, serum, and insulin. The contracting hEB derived using these methods were composed of high percentages (64-89%) of cardiac troponin I(+) cells that displayed ultrastructural properties of functional cardiomyocytes and uniform electrophysiological profiles responsive to cardioactive drugs.

Conclusion/significance

This efficient and cost-effective universal system for cardiac differentiation of hiPSC allows a potentially unlimited production of functional cardiomyocytes suitable for application to hPSC-based drug development, cardiac disease modeling, and the future generation of clinically-safe nonviral human cardiac cells for regenerative medicine.

SUBMITTER: Burridge PW

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3072973 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Self-renewable human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) serve as a potential unlimited ex vivo source of human cardiomyocytes (CMs) for cell-based disease modeling and therapies. Although recent advances in directed differentiation protocols have enabled more efficient derivation of hPSC-derived CMs with an efficiency of ?50%-80% CMs and a final yield of ?1-20 CMs per starting undifferentiated hPSC, these protocols are often not readily transferrable across lines without first optimizing multiple parameters. Further, the resultant populations are undefined for chamber specificity or heterogeneous containing mixtures of atrial, ventricular (V), and pacemaker derivatives. Here we report a highly cost-effective and reproducibly efficient system for deriving hPSC-ventricular cardiomyocytes (VCMs) from all five human embryonic stem cell (HES2, H7, and H9) and human induced PSC (hiPSC) (reprogrammed from human adult peripheral blood CD34(+) cells using nonintegrating episomal vectors) lines tested. Cardiogenic embryoid bodies could be formed by the sequential addition of BMP4, Rho kinase inhibitor, activin-A, and IWR-1. Spontaneously contracting clusters appeared as early as day 8. At day 16, up to 95% of cells were cTnT(+). Of which, 93%, 94%, 100%, 92%, and 92% of cardiac derivatives from HES2, H7, H9, and two iPSC lines, respectively, were VCMs as gauged by signature ventricular action potential and ionic currents (INa(+)/ICa,L(+)/IKr(+)/IKATP(+)); Ca(2+) transients showed positive chronotropic responses to ?-adrenergic stimulation. Our simple, cost-effective protocol required the least amounts of reagents and time compared with others. While the purity and percentage of PSC-VCMs were comparable to a recently published protocol, the present yield and efficiency with a final output of up to 70 hPSC-VCMs per hPSC was up to 5-fold higher and without the need of performing line-specific optimization. These differences were discussed. The results may lead to mass production of hPSC-VCMs in bioreactors.