Washington University in St. LouisJun 25 2024 Using animals to study heart disease doesn't always translate well to human health outcomes, and human heart cells available for research don't work outside the human body.
Huebsch and colleagues get around this challenge by tricking stem cells into behaving like mature heart cells, inducing pluripotent stem cell -derived cardiomyocytes to behave as if they are grownup heart cells bearing the mutation that causes HCM. They detail their findings in a paper recently published in iScience.
Jonathan Silva, a professor of biomedical engineering at McKelvey Engineering and a co-author of the research, said that an electrical arrythmia often affects people who have HCM, but the mutation is nowhere near the genes that encode for electrical activity. Related StoriesWith this new research, Silva and Huebsch now have better idea of why this might be the case.