Engineered human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiac cells and tissues for electrophysiological studies

Human cardiomyocytes (CMs) do not proliferate in culture and are difficult to obtain for practical reasons. As such, our understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the physiological and pathophysiological development of the human heart is mostly extrapolated from studies of the mouse and other animal models or heterologus expression of defective gene product(s) in non-human cells. Although these studies provided numerous important insights, much of the exact behavior in human cells remains unexplored given that significant species differences exist. With the derivation of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from patients with underlying heart disease, a source of human CMs for disease modeling, cardiotoxicity screening and drug discovery is now available. In this review, we focus our discussion on the use of hESC/iPSC-derived cardiac cells and tissues for studying various heart rhythm disorders and the associated pro-arrhythmogenic properties in relation to advancements in electrophysiology and tissue engineering.