Cardiac Tissue Model Helps Study Heart Development and Test Drugs

Induced pluripotent stem cells derived from humans are currently used to generate new promising cellular models suitable to study human cell and tissue biology and test new drugs in vitro. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have generated a beating cardiac tissue obtained from human induced pluripotent stem cells. These cells were cultured under specific biochemical and biophysical conditions and were able to differentiate into cardiac cells, forming heart microchambers. To test the suitability of this model for drug screening, researchers exposed the cardiac cells to thalidomide—a drug known to cause birth defects—and found that thalidomide perturbed the normal formation of the cardiac microchambers, reducing the frequency at which the cells beat.  This new model might be suitable to study early phases of cardiac development and screen for drugs that might be potentially risky for the fetus.