Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Progress in understanding and treatment of numerous human diseases has been hampered by the lack of representative human in vitro models, especially for diseases in which the affected cell types are difficult to obtain, such as heart diseases. Over the past decade, the use of disease affected cell types derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells has developed into a unique and powerful method to study the pathophysiological mechanisms of human cardiac disease and drive the development of novel targeted therapies. In this chapter, an overview is provided of the iPS-derived cardiomyocyte (iPS-CM) models for inherited cardiac disease that have been studied so far. In addition to the key findings of these individual studies and the progress that has been made since the first iPS-CM disease model, limitations and important methodological considerations are discussed. The current advances in iPS-CM disease modeling and the challenges yet to overcome show that this field holds great promise, but is still in its infancy.