Generation of human cardiomyocytes: a differentiation protocol from feeder-free human induced pluripotent stem cells.

In order to investigate the events driving heart development and to determine the molecular mechanisms leading to myocardial diseases in humans, it is essential first to generate functional human cardiomyocytes (CMs). The use of these cells in drug discovery and toxicology studies would also be highly beneficial, allowing new pharmacological molecules for the treatment of cardiac disorders to be validated pre-clinically on cells of human origin. Of the possible sources of CMs, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are among the most promising, as they can be derived directly from readily accessible patient tissue and possess an intrinsic capacity to give rise to all cell types of the body (1). Several methods have been proposed for differentiating iPS cells into CMs, ranging from the classical embryoid bodies (EBs) aggregation approach to chemically defined protocols (2,3). In this article we propose an EBs-based protocol and show how this method can be employed to efficiently generate functional CM-like cells from feeder-free iPS cells.