Evaluation of a New Media Designed to Drive Improved Maturity of iPSC-Derived Cardiomyocytes for Cardiac Disease, Cardiotoxicity and Drug Screening

The poster Evaluation of a New Media Designed to Drive Improved Maturity of iPSC-Derived Cardiomyocytes for Cardiac Disease, Cardiotoxicity and Drug Screening presents Axol Bioscience’s development of a novel cardiac maturation media to overcome limitations of immature iPSC-CM phenotypes.

Key highlights include:

• Challenge: Standard cardiomyocyte maintenance media (e.g. ax2530) often results in immature cells with poor sarcomere structure, low maturity marker expression, high spontaneous beating, long FPD, and slow conduction velocity.
• Solution: A new cardiac maturation media (ax2550) developed in collaboration with the University of Toronto improves functional and molecular maturity.
• Validation Across Two Cell Lines (ax2508 & ax5858):
  • Improved Sarcomere Alignment: ICC shows better structure and organization
  • Increased Marker Expression: cTnT and Connexin 43 (Cx43) elevated
  • Electrophysiological Improvements:
    • Reduced spontaneous beat rate
    • Shortened field potential duration (FPD)
    • Increased two-point conduction velocity
• Transcriptomic Analysis:
  • Upregulation of maturity markers: KCNJ2, KCNJ3, PLN, SCN1B, KCNQ1
  • Downregulation of immaturity markers: HCN4, MEF2C, NODAL, LEFTY, TNNI1
• Functional Assays: MEA data supports ICC and gene expression findings, confirming enhanced maturity

This media supports the development of more predictive cardiac models for disease research, cardiotoxicity screening, and drug discovery.

Featured Axol Products:

• axoCells™ Ventricular Cardiomyocytes – ax2508, ax5858
• axoCells™ Cardiomyocyte Maintenance Media – ax2530
• axoCells™ Cardiac Maturation Media – ax2550