Human cardiac organoids for the modelling of myocardial infarction and drug cardiotoxicity

Abstract

Environmental factors are the largest contributors to cardiovascular disease. Here we show that cardiac organoids that incor- porate an oxygen-diffusion gradient and that are stimulated with the neurotransmitter noradrenaline model the structure of the human heart after myocardial infarction (by mimicking the infarcted, border and remote zones), and recapitulate hallmarks of myocardial infarction (in particular, pathological metabolic shifts, fibrosis and calcium handling) at the transcriptomic, struc- tural and functional levels. We also show that the organoids can model hypoxia-enhanced doxorubicin cardiotoxicity. Human organoids that model diseases with non-genetic pathological factors could help with drug screening and development.

Publication
In Nature Biomedical Engineering