2023 - Producing High Quality CRISPR-Cas9 Edited hiPSCs for Cardiac Disease Modeling

The Nobel prize winning discovery of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) facilitated a new era of disease modeling in vitro. This event inspired clinicians and scientists alike to use those cells for regenerative medicine, or for modeling of genetic diseases, to gain further insights into disease mechanisms on a cellular level. However, experimental studies using hiPSCs can experience high inter- and intra-experimental variability further fueling the reproducibility crisis in life sciences.
In the past 10 years much progress has been made in defining quality criteria (QC) for hiPSCs to achieve genome stability and high pluripotency over prolonged culture duration. These QC parameters include single cell clonal selection, karyotyping, pluripotency assessment and the establishment of master cell banks, especially in the context of CRISPR-Cas9 genome edited hiPSCs. Additionally, Numerous cardiac differentiation protocols have been established using monolayer (ML) adherent or 3D suspension cultures. However, generating large numbers of high quality human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) with high consistency between batches, different cell lines and cryo-storage has remained challenging leading to poor reproducibility of experimental results.
The featured speakers used a stirred suspension bioreactor system to create an optimal environment for cell growth and differentiation. This enabled them to create a unified differentiation protocol that can be applied to a variety of hiPSCs (patient and control lines) with high cardiomyocyte content and reduced batch-to-batch variability. Using a wide array of cardiac disease modeling assays, they then confirmed high reproducibility of cryo-preserved hiPSC-derived cardiomyocytes.
Join this webinar to learn about optimizing the growth and differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) into cardiomyocytes and enhancing cardiac disease modeling.