Study familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy using patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells

Familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is one the most common heart disorders, with gene mutations in the cardiac sarcomere. Studying HCM with patient-specific induced pluripotent stem-cell (iPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes (CMs) would benefit the understanding of HCM mechanism, as well as the development of personalized therapeutic strategies.

To investigate the molecular mechanism underlying the abnormal CM functions in HCM, we derived iPSCs from an HCM patient with a single missense mutation (Arginine442Glycine) in the MYH7 gene. CMs were next enriched from HCM and healthy iPSCs, followed with whole transcriptome sequencing and pathway enrichment analysis. A widespread increase of genes responsible for 'Cell Proliferation' was observed in HCM iPSC-CMs when compared with control iPSC-CMs. Additionally, HCM iPSC-CMs exhibited disorganized sarcomeres and electrophysiological irregularities. Furthermore, disease phenotypes of HCM iPSC-CMs were attenuated with pharmaceutical treatments.

Overall, this study explored the possible patient-specific and mutation-specific disease mechanism of HCM, and demonstrates the potential of using HCM iPSC-CMs for future development of therapeutic strategies. Additionally, the whole methodology established in this study could be utilized to study mechanisms of other human-inherited heart diseases.