Scientific poster: 3D iPSC-derived cardiac microtissues for drug discovery

The sensitivity and accuracy of human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes as disease models would be further improved by generating models that more closely resemble the adult heart. Various 3D cardiac models that have been developed bridge the limitations of conventional 2D models, but show batch-to-batch variations and require high cell numbers along with complex equipment, thus restricting their suitability for use in high throughput screening. 

In this scientific poster, we assess whether 3D cardiac microtissues comprised of a tri-cellular combination of cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells an fibroblasts, can be scalable and lead to improvements in predicting drug responses and modelling genetic cardiac diseases.

Our results indicate that 3D cardiac microtissues are scalable and show improved predictivity of inotropic drug responses, compared to 2D models. We show for the first time that 3D cardiac microtissues can be formed in an automatic procedure, holding great potential for high throughput screening.