Abstract

Engineering Microphysiological Models of Human Cardiac and Skeletal Muscle Disease

Megan L. McCain, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, University of Southern California

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in the United States. One reason for this statistic is that researchers in academia and industry have been forced to rely on experimental models, such as rodents or simplified cell culture systems, that lack relevance to native human heart tissue. In this talk, I will describe our efforts in engineering microphysiological models of human cardiac tissue as next-generation platforms for cardiac disease modeling and drug screening. We are focused on developing and integrating three core technologies: (1) Enhancing the differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) into cardiac myocytes; (2) Engineering cellular microenvironments that mimic key features of native cardiac tissue; and (3) Developing quantitative assays for characterizing essential functional outputs, such as contractility. I will also describe how we have extended our technologies to skeletal muscle tissue as new platforms for modeling human skeletal myopathies. Together, these microphysiological models of human striated muscle tissue have many applications in establishing human disease mechanisms and screening the functional effects of drugs with disease and patient specificity.