Stem cell advance yields mature heart muscle cells

A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has induced human embryonic stem cells (hESC) to differentiate toward pure-population, mature heart muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes.

Wendy Crone

A substrate patterned with a precisely sized series of channels played a critical role in the advance.

Published online in the journal Biomaterials, the research could open the door to advances in areas that include tissue engineering and drug discovery and testing.

Researchers currently can differentiate hESC into immature heart muscle cells. Those cells, however, don't develop the robust internal structures repeating sections of muscle cells called sarcomeres that enable cardiomyocytes to produce the contracting force that allows the heart to pump blood. Other cell components that allow heart muscle cells to communicate and work together also are less developed in immature cardiomyocytes.

One barrier to efforts to produce more mature cells is the culture surface itself; hESC are notoriously finicky. "It's really hard to culture stem cells effectively and to provide them with an environment that's going to help them to thrive and differentiate in the way you want," says lead author Wendy Crone, a professor of engineering physics, biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering at UW-Madison.

Recently, three-dimensional and micropatterned substrates have emerged as more accurately mimicking the cells' physiological environment. However, the majority of previous research studies using patterning were conducted using cells from rats, says Max Salick, a Ph.D. student in materials science at UW-Madison and first author on the paper.

"One of the unique aspects of our research is that it observes human cardiomyocytes' response to micropatterning geometries," he says.

Working in laboratories in the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the UW-Madison researchers focused on finding the pattern, including the right size scale, that suits the human stem cells.

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Stem cell advance yields mature heart muscle cells