(558b) Cardiac Tissue Engineering Using Human Pluripotent Stem Cells

Approximately one person dies in every 34 seconds as a consequence of heart diseases in the United States, and more than 5 million patients in the US suffer from heart failure, a disabling and frequently fatal disease condition. Without organ transplantation, end stage heart failure is irreversible. In addition, approximately 50% of heart disease patients do not respond to regular therapies including medication, device implantation and eventually require heart transplantation.  Thus heart disease therapy urgently requires the development of novel disease-specific drugs, of new cell resource for replacement therapy, as well as the donor hearts for transplantation. However, those treatments largely remain underdeveloped or inadequate. Heart tissue engineering holds great promise for heart disease therapy by building patient and disease-specific engineered heart tissues for drug screening, drug testing and myocardium implantation, as well as the ultimate engineered hearts for transplantation. Recent progress in human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells provides the required cell resource to engineer patient-specific heart constructs for the future heart disease therapies. In this study, we engineered 3D heart tissues with human pluripotent stem cells, including human iPS cell and human embryonic stem (ES) cell derived cardiovascular cells. The engineered heart constructs exhibited spontaneous contractions and were functionally synchronized with electrical stimulation.  To explore the potential pharmaceutical applications, we challenged the engineered heart constructs with various chemicals and found the constructs showed similar responses as those from the in vivo hearts.