Cardiac arrhythmia modelling using iPS cells

Innovation in stem cell biology has greatly impacted on medical researches. The generation of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) established the novel concept not only in regenerative medicine but also disease modelling. There are several reports that disease-specific iPSC-derived cells have recapitulated cellular phenotypes of wide varieties of diseases. The disease-specific iPSCs are utilised to understand unknown pathogenesis by in vitro examination of disease-specific iPSC-derived cells. It is also shown that disease-specific iPSC-derived cells can be applied to high throughput screening for new drugs. Early reports about disease modelling using iPSCs focused on various types of cardiac arrhythmia because it is difficult to model human arrhythmia in animal models such as a genetically engineered mouse and it is relatively clear to show the phenotypes of cardiac arrhythmia in iPSC-derived cardiomyocyte such as abnormal electrophysiological activities. In this chapter, we focus on the conceptual and practical issues about cardiac arrhythmia modelling using disease-specific iPSCs and discuss the future directions.