Dynamic Loading of Human Engineered Heart Tissue Enhances Contractile Function and Drives a Desmosome-Linked Disease Phenotype

Researchers developed a new dynamic engineered heart tissue model that enabled them to tune preload and have unconstrained contractile shortening of >10%. For disease modeling, they used human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes from a patient with arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy due to mutations in the desmoplakin gene.