Expansion of early cardiovascular progenitor cells in vitro

A paper recently published by Vahdat et al. in “Scientific Reports” was featured by ESC & iPSC News. In this work from the Cardiovascular Group of Royan Stem Cell Institute, they introduce a defined, simple, and reproducible protocol for long-term expansion, maintenance, and storage of hPSC-derived cardiogenic mesodermal cells (CMCs). They screened some cell signaling factors to develop a chemically defined culture medium. Cultured CMCs expanded for more than 10 passages resulting in >10¹⁴ cells, and retained their morphology, molecular pattern, and in vitro differentiation propensity into cardiac lineages over passages. They observed no tumorigenicity, engraftment of the self-renewed cells, and improved cardiac performance after transplantation into rat ischemic hearts. This culture condition is reproducible and capable of transformation to a carrier-free suspension culture, which is required for large-scale production of CMCs. Their results provided a novel approach for long-term self-renewal and maintenance of early cardiac progenitor cells, which is a fundamental step for commercialization, developmental, tissue engineering, and cell-based clinical studies.The link to the paper can be found here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-52516-8