Collaborating with Junaid Afzal at UCSF, we created a platform that closely mimics the extracellular matrix in the heart, matching its mechanical and chemical properties to rapidly mature human cardiac constructs. Here is the link.

Congratulations to Yamin Liu, Wenqiang Du, Yasir Suhail, Visar Ajeti as well as our collaborators in Lixia Yue’s lab (Pengyu Zong, Jianlin Feng), as well as Alix Deymier and Maya Yankova for their help.

Cardiovascular safety is the number one cause for failure of preclinical drug development, and there is a long standing need to create human cardiac tissue models to test drugs for cardiotoxicity. Currently, the small animal heart models display vastly different biochemical, physiological, and genetic features from humans—making it difficult to replicate the human heart in preclinical studies. In particular, it is very difficult to perform metabolic assessment of current cardiac constructs. Heart beats continuously and is a highly metabolically active organ.

In the study, we utilized the cardiac biology in an adult human heart to rapidly mature differentiated cardiac cells into a more adult-like state. Within 30 days, we achieved cardiac cells that displayed structural, mechanical, metabolic, and electrophysiological characteristics close to adult heart muscle.