Background: Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) play an important role in disease modeling and drug testing. However, the current methods are time-consuming and lack an isogenic control.
Objectives: This study sought to establish an efficient technology to generate human PSC-based disease models with isogenic control.
Methods: The ion channel genes KCNQ1 and KCNH2 with dominant negative mutations causing long QT syndrome types 1 and 2, respectively, were stably integrated into a safe harbor AAVS1 locus using zinc finger nuclease technology.
Results: Patch-clamp recording revealed that the edited iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (iPSC-CMs) displayed characteristic long QT syndrome phenotype and significant prolongation of the action potential duration compared with the unedited control cells. Finally, addition of nifedipine (L-type calcium channel blocker) or pinacidil (KATP-channel opener) shortened the action potential duration of iPSC-CMs, confirming the validity of isogenic iPSC lines for drug testing in the future.
Conclusions: Our study demonstrates that iPSC-CM-based disease models can be rapidly generated by overexpression of dominant negative gene mutants.
Keywords: disease models; drug testing; genome editing; long QT syndrome; stem cells.
Copyright © 2014 American College of Cardiology Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.