Cardiomyocytes

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the industrialized world. The development of heart disease is usually the result of dysfunction within individual cardiac muscle cells or cardiomyocytes. Individual cardiomyocytes represent the smallest fully functional model system of the cardiac muscle, which can be used to examine the force production, relaxation function, ion regulation, cell signaling, and gene expression.

As the main cell type of the heart, cardiomyocytes are primarily involved in the contractile function of the heart, allowing blood to be pumped around the body. Biochemical, molecular and hemodynamic changes can fundamentally alter the function of cardiomyocytes. Therefore, understanding the regulatory factors in cardiomyocyte function is essential for the discovery and development of therapeutic interventions. Studies using isolated cardiomyocytes have obtained important information about cardiomyopathies, including but not limited to atrial fibrillation, myocardial infarction and sudden adult death syndrome.

Cardiomyocyte cultures can provide a homogeneous population of single cells, which are easy to operate and visualize. Compared with the whole heart, cardiomyocyte cultures are relatively pure with limited contaminating cell types, such as endothelial cells. In addition, the preparation of cardiomyocytes isolated from small mammals allows for a large number of rapid and relatively low-cost experiments compared to studies conducted in whole animals.

Our cardiomyocytes are ideal for use in drug screening, drug validation, cardiotoxicity testing as well as metabolic studies and electrophysiological applications. Once thawed, our cardiomyocytes will soon begin to spontaneously beat in vitro and are characterized by the expression of cardiac-specific markers, including cardiac troponin. We also provide fully-defined culture media and coating reagents optimized for use with cardiomyocytes for maximal recovery and viability for experiment assays.