A platform for generation of chamber-specific cardiac tissues and disease modelling

This study presents the Biowire II platform, a micro scale mechanical testing cardiac tissue system that enables long-term culture and non-invasive, online measurement of passive tension, active force, contractile dynamics, and calcium transients under electrical pacing. Using directed differentiation plus chronic electrical conditioning, the authors generated electrophysiologically distinct atrial and ventricular tissues with chamber-specific gene expression and drug responses, and engineered heteropolar atrio-ventricular tissues with spatially confined responses to serotonin and ranolazine. The platform also supported months-long conditioning (up to ~8 months) to model polygenic cardiac disease (left ventricular hypertrophy) from patient-derived iPSCs.