A Human In Vitro Cardiac Platform for Genetic and Non-genetic Pathologies Models

Dear Colleagues,

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) remain the leading cause of death, disability, and morbidity among chronic diseases. CVDs and, in particular, chronic heart failure (HF) are common in the elderly people as a result of risk factors (usually hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus, coronary artery disease, accelerating cardiovascular aging) and comorbidities (atrial fibrillation, anemia, kidney disease, pulmonary disease, other). Cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying effects of aging on cardiovascular function include oxidative stress and chronic inflammation, but they remain largely unknown. Regardless structural remodeling, atrial fibrillation, for instance, may be a marker of atrial diseases although inflammation, oxidative stress and adaptive alterations of cellular metabolism constitute basic mediators for the electrical instability able to initiate and/or maintain atrial myopathy. Although usually associated with genetic cardiovascular disease, a high percentage of patients with AF are affected by non-cardiovascular disease (i.e., Sepsis, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and sleep apnea). Autocrine and paracrine signaling involving intercellular factors, cytokines, exosomes and macrophages have been demonstrated to mediate cardiac pathogenesis condition.

The discovery of potential use of hiPSCs-derived cardiomyocytes (CMs) has opened the possibility to obtain differentiated cells that recapitulate the fundamental characteristic of primary cells, thus providing a unique tool for in vitro personalized cell model. Usually applied for realization of genetic cardiac diseases platforms, hiPSCs technology has recently been proposed to be used for investigation of cardiac pathologies deriving from non-cardiac diseases. It has been shown that paracrine mediators and differentiated hiPSCs-CMs are able to reproduce specific cardiac pathological environment useful in investigation of underlying cellular mechanisms as potential targets for drug screening.

This Special Issue, titled ‘A Human in Vitro Cardiac Platform for Genetic and Non-Genetic Pathologies Models’, will aim to explore and collect knowledge about the potential use of hiPSCs-CMs, to reproduce electrical, molecular and biochemical mechanisms of cardiac remodeling resulting from genetic and non-genetic diseases.

Dr. Claudia Altomare
Guest Editor

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• Autocrine and paracrine factors
• Genetic cardiac disease
• Non-cardiac diseases
• hiPSCs cardiomyocytes