Human cardiomyocytes are fully differentiated cells with little to none regenerative capacity. Therefore, their availability for regenerative medicine, disease modeling and tissue engineering applications is usually limited and costly. To overcome these problems, hiPSC-CMs have been increasingly used as a source of cells, and are obtained followind multiple protocols that might not be replicable or cost effective.
To overcome the limitations of present differentiation protocols, I am studying the chemical and metabolic requirements to obtain cardiomyocytes from hiPSCs. The goal is to develop a chemically defined, cost-effective and high yield strategy to obtain fully functional cardiomyocytes that is easily translatable and replicable by other labs.