A Snapshot seminar hosted by the School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience

Academic host: Stephen Harmer

New ways to understand heart function are needed to ensure this organ is protected from genetic or acquired disease and environmental insults, such as drug-induced cardiotoxicity. Heart failure is a leading cause of mortality globally, with more than 20 million deaths annually. This situation is unlikely to change unless new therapeutics are developed and there are no new drugs available. Equally, cardiotoxicity is the leading cause of drugs failing to reach clinical use or to be withdrawn from market due to unexpected deaths. Of the 200 most prescribed medicines, more than 40% carry risk warnings for the cardiovascular system. These issues are confounded by poor models that are irrelevant for the cardiovascular system, such as tumour cell lines, or which suffer from variability or species differences. One route to complement or improve upon the existing systems is the use of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), which are generated from the inner cell mass of the embryo or by epigenetic reprogramming of somatic cells, such as skin fibroblasts. These hPSCs can be proliferated extensively in culture and then directed upon demand to produce cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs). Further refinement is possible by coupling hPSCs with gene editing technology using CRISPR, allowing for precise modification of the genome. This seminar will discuss how our work using hPSC-CMs is providing new opportunities to understand diseases such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which can lead to sudden cardiac death, as has been witnessed in football players mid match. In addition, we will show how working with the pharmaceutical industry is increasing confidence in human stem cell models for drug safety evaluation and is aiding the decision to reduce the use of experimental animals.

Join via Zoom: https://bristol-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/4798119105?pwd=MlZRZEt6aWhQb0NYT2pXd3N5aVRvQT09