Gabor Foldes to Speak on Pluripotent Stem Cell Modeling at Tissue Models Conf. May 6-7, 2014, Berlin
Gabor Foldes will present on "Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Modeling on Cardiac Remodeling" at the Tissue Models & Drug Screening Conference, to be held May 6-7, 2014 in Berlin.
- (1888PressRelease) January 25, 2014 - Human cardiomyocytes from myocardium are difficult to culture and costly to obtain. Due to their limited availability, in vitro assays that use these cells are low-throughput, thus limiting their application to drug discovery. However, cardiomyocytes from human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC-CM) can be obtained with disease-specific genotypes and phenotypes, enhancing the potential of stem cell-based disease modeling. These cardiomyocytes are suggested to have many of the properties of authentic cells, and their phenotypes provide validation that characteristics of the disease can be reproduced in vitro.
The challenge now is how to utilize these cells to model long-term disease processes. Dr. Foldes will discuss some of the advantages pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes have over the classical rodent neonate preparation. hiPSC-CM are able to remain stable in culture over months and have greater ease of genetic manipulation. They are also able to be derived from a wide range of patients and normal subjects, which allows researchers to dissect genotype/phenotype relationships.
One of the high-priority disease targets is hypertrophy because of its central role in the transition to heart failure. Dr. Foldes, whose research focus is on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of cardiac remodeling and heart failure, will share about the high-throughput capabilities of the hiPSC-CM system, which are ideally placed to dissect these and then translate into 2D and 3D drug discovery platforms. However, superficial similarities between human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes and adult cardiomyocytes may mask complex differences in signaling.
Dr. Foldes, who runs a pluripotent stem cell lab in the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, will join other researchers in the field of 3D model systems at the meeting to discuss how these systems will affect drug discovery.
For more information about the conference, please visit www.gtcbio.com/tissuemodels.
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