Human cardiac organoids for disease modeling

Abstract

Human cardiac drug discovery and disease modeling face challenges in recapitulating cellular complexity and animal-to-human translation due to the limitations of conventional 2D cell culture and animal models. The development of human cardiac organoid technologies could help in stimulating and maintaining differentiated cell functions for extended periods of time. By closely mimicking in vivo organ functions in vitro they could thereby help in overcoming the obstacles mentioned above. By constructing human cardiac organoids from pluripotent stem cell-derived cells, derived from patients with specific known geno- and phenotypes, more complex and robust in vitro tools have recently become available for disease modeling. In this review we will describe the relevance and importance of evolving organoid platforms in disease biology. We further provide examples of cardiac organoid platforms which may lead the way towards future personalized medicine and drug discovery.