Arrhythmia Assessment in Heterotypic Human Cardiac Myocyte-Fibroblast Microtissues

Risk assessment assays for chemically induced arrhythmia are critical, but significant limitations exist with current cardiotoxicity testing, including a focus on single select ion channels, the use of non-human species in vitro and in vivo, and limited direct physiological translation. To be predictive of actual adverse clinical arrhythmic risk, arrhythmia assessment models for chemicals and drugs should be fit-for-purpose and suited for evaluating compounds in which the mechanism of action may not be entirely known. Here, we describe methods for efficient and reliable screening for arrhythmogenic cardiotoxicity with a 3D human cardiac microtissue model using purified human-induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes and human cardiac fibroblasts. Applying optical mapping of voltage and calcium-sensitive dyes-an established approach to evaluate cardiac action potentials and calcium transients-to 3D heterotypic cardiac myocyte-fibroblast tissues allows for the generation and functional analysis of a large number of individual microtissues to provide greater throughput and high statistical power in analyses. Hundreds of microtissues in standard cell culture plates can be produced with low variability beat-to-beat, microtissue-to-microtissue, and across hiPSC-cardiomyocyte differentiation batches, reducing the number of microtissues required per condition for predictive outputs. The platform described here can be used as a sensitive, efficient, and predictive preclinical model validated for the purpose of assessing human pro-arrhythmic risk.