Dystrophin-deficient cardiomyocytes derived from human urine: New biologic reagents for drug discovery
2014
Xuan Guan | David L. Mack | Claudia M. Moreno | Jennifer L. Strande | Julie Mathieu | Yingai Shi | Chad D. Markert | Zejing Wang | Guihua Liu | Michael W. Lawlor | Emily C. Moorefield | Tara N. Jones | James A. Fugate | Mark E. Furth | Charles E. Murry | Hannele Ruohola-Baker | Yuanyuan Zhang | Luis F. Santana | Martin K. Childers
The ability to extract somatic cells from a patient and reprogram them to pluripotency opens up new possibilities for personalized medicine. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have been employed to generate beating cardiomyocytes from a patient's skin or blood cells. Here, iPSC methods were used to generate cardiomyocytes starting from the urine of a patient with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Urine was chosen as a starting material because it contains adult stem cells called urine-derived stem cells (USCs). USCs express the canonical reprogramming factors c-myc and klf4, and possess high telomerase activity. Pluripotency of urine-derived iPSC clones was confirmed by immunocytochemistry, RT-PCR and teratoma formation. Urine-derived iPSC clones generated from healthy volunteers and a DMD patient were differentiated into beating cardiomyocytes using a series of small molecules in monolayer culture. Results indicate that cardiomyocytes retain the DMD patient's dystrophin mutation. Physiological assays suggest that dystrophin-deficient cardiomyocytes possess phenotypic differences from normal cardiomyocytes. These results demonstrate the feasibility of generating cardiomyocytes from a urine sample and that urine-derived cardiomyocytes retain characteristic features that might be further exploited for mechanistic studies and drug discovery.
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