Review

Human induced pluripotent stem cell for modeling cardiovascular diseases

¹ Beijing Anzhen Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China
² The key laboratory of Remodeling-related Cardiovascular Disease, Ministry of Education, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China
³ Beijing Institute of Heart Lung & Blood Vessel Disease, Beijing, China
⁴ Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
⁵ Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
⁶ Cardiovascular Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
⁷ Lorry I. Lokey Stem Cell Research Building, Rm G1105, 265 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

^* Correspondence: jdu@bcm.edu

Received: 1 August 2013
Accepted: 6 November 2013

Abstract

The invention of the induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology allows patient-specific, mature somatic cells to be converted into an unlimited supply of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs). These iPSCs can then in turn be differentiated into any cell type including neurons, cardiac cells, pancreatic cells, liver cells, blood cells or enterocytes. Although cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of death in the world, the limited cell derivation and cell number in cardiac tissue makes it difficult to study the CVDs using the existing cardiac cell model. By differentiating the patient-specific iPSCs into cardiomyocytes, scientists can generate iPSC-based ‘disease in a dish’ models and use them to better understand disease mechanism. Here we review the current progress in using iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes to model human CVDs.