BioProject

While human organoid systems have provided a powerful platform in modeling diseases caused by genetic disorders, non-genetic factors, such as lifestyle and environment, are the largest attributable factors to devastating diseases like cardiovascular disease (CVD), the leading cause of death worldwide. More...

While human organoid systems have provided a powerful platform in modeling diseases caused by genetic disorders, non-genetic factors, such as lifestyle and environment, are the largest attributable factors to devastating diseases like cardiovascular disease (CVD), the leading cause of death worldwide. Specifically, myocardial infarction (MI) (i.e., heart attack) makes up ~8.5% of CVD and is a common cause of heart failure with a 40% five-year mortality after the first MI. This highlights an urgent need to develop relevant human heart failure models for drug development. This is further evidenced by the disappointing performance of heart failure drugs in clinical trials during the last decade, which has been partially attributed to the distinct differences between human patient hearts and animal heart failure models. Here, we combined major non-genetic causal factors of MI with our previously established cardiac organoids to create the first human organoid model of cardiac infarction. In particular, we leveraged the diffusion limitation in 3D microtissues to recreate the nutrient diffusion gradient across infarcted hearts (i.e., infarct-border-remote zones) in human cardiac organoids to induce cardiac organotypic response to infarction. This enabled the recapitulation of major MI hallmarks in human cardiac organoids at the transcriptomic, structural and functional level. Overall design: Three Control Organoid replicates versus Three Infarct Organoid replicates Less...