New work published by the Heather and Carr groups in Diabetes has developed a model of “human diabetic cardiomyopathy in a dish”.
Diabetes affects 1/10 people in the UK, and cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality. We know that changes in the heart muscle occur early during disease progression and predispose to the development of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. However, we currently don’t know what causes the cardiomyocyte changes and have limited treatment options available. Therefore, human-centric cardiac models are needed for understanding disease progression and developing new therapies for type 2 diabetes.
In the current paper, using human induced pluripotent stem cell–derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CM) in both 2D and 3D as engineered heart tissue (EHT), they have produced a model of diabetic cardiomyopathy in cellulo.
Taking an unbiased systems biology approach, they showed that their model recapitulated the dysregulated pathways and functional derangements in the diabetic myocardium. Furthermore, using diabetes treatments they showed improvements in cardiomyocyte function and metabolism in cellulo.
Lisa Heather comments, 'This new model of “diabetic cardiomyopathy in a dish” allows us to start unpicking disease mechanisms in a human centric manner, something that until now has not been possible as access to human cardiac biopsies early during disease development is not feasible.'
Read the paper here