Human iPSC-cardiomyocyte-aggregate cell therapy in non-human primates and correlation of heart recovery with contractile and electrophysiological cardiomyocyte properties

Abstract

This study demonstrates the successful production and injection of human induced pluripotent stem cell cardiomyocyte aggregates into infarcted cynomolgus monkey hearts, resulting in substantial, structured human grafts three months after cell transplantation. Transient graft-induced arrhythmias decreased over time. Both the arrhythmogenicity and the substantial heart function recovery in vivo notably seemed to correlate with induced pluripotent stem cell clone-dependent contractile and electrophysiological cardiomyocyte properties in vitro. Overexpression of a red fluorescent reporter protein led to a dysregulated conduction and contraction machinery in yet engraftment competent cardiomyocytes, providing an important tool to mechanistically understand and improve induced pluripotent stem cell-based heart repair in preclinical models. We demonstrate the logistically important, temporal uncoupling of cardiomyocyte production from transplantation. Cardiomyocyte aggregate transplantation yielded results comparable to the reported transplantation of 10-20-fold higher numbers of dissociated human embryonic stem cell- cardiomyocytes and suggests a higher degree of cell/ tissue maturation in cardiac grafts. Our study promotes reduced cell production costs, highlights the need for an in vitro potency assay, and shows a pragmatic new avenue for the clinical translation of human induced pluripotent stem cell-based heart repair. The study shows successful therapy with hiPSC-cardiomyocyte aggregates in infarcted non-human primates, including uncoupling of cell production from transplantation and correlation of heart recovery in vivo with cardiomyocyte properties in vitro.