Category: innoVation

We start the new year with an article by Lebrec et al., 2021 covering CAR-T / TCR immunotherapy research findings with a focus on nonclinical safety evaluation. Engineered T cell therapies provide huge opportunities to address current unmet medical needs but present also unique challenges in terms of safety assessment during nonclinical and clinical development.…Continue readinginnoVation Series – Research Article of the Month – January

This article from Cui et al., 2019 underlines once again how important mature human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) are for investigating tox effects reliably for human cancer treatment. Knowing that children are more susceptible to reveal doxorubicin-induced cardiotoxicity, this article investigates underlying mechanisms by comparing hiPSC-CMs of 30 and 60 days in culture that were treated…Continue readinginnoVation Series – Research Article of the Month – December

This months research article caught our eye because it analyzes the cell persistance and electrical integration of intramyocardially transplanted murine iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes. Murine iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes were tested in vitro for best attachment rates at three different developmental stages. The best two were then selected for injection into infarcted hearts of adult mice. Cell persistance and…Continue readinginnoVation Series – Research Article of the Month – October

July’s innovation Series article by Luo and Li et al., 2020 focuses on the role of type 2 ryanodine receptor (RYR2), an essential calcium channel required for excitation-contraction coupling in cardiomyocytes during human embryonic cardiac development. Read the article to find out how human iPSC-cardiomyocyte RYR2 -/- lines were generated via CRISP/Cas9 and compared to…Continue readinginnoVation Series – Research Article of the Month – July 2021

Similar to April’s innovation series issue, we have chosen an article that deals with the question of whether a cardiotoxic effect is of direct or systemic origin. In this month’s issue we are not looking at CAR-T related cardiac toxicity, but SARS-CoV-2 related severe cardiovascular symptoms. Read the article by Marchiano et al., 2021 and…Continue readinginnoVation Series – Research Article of the Month – June 2021

We keep the focus on reviews this month, with one that has summarized current maturation methods for human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes. Read the review to learn about maturity evaluation of human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes in comparison to adult cardiomyocytes and how prolonged culture time, biochemical cues, cellular interaction, 3D cell-culture, and of course substrate…Continue readinginnoVation Series – Research Article of the Month – May 2021

This months article is an intersting review that summarizes the current understanding of potential cardiovascular toxicities of CD19-specific Car T cell therapies. CD19-specific chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies have shown remarkable early success in highly refractory and relapsing hematological malignancies. However, most significant side effects of the therapy are cytokine release syndrome (CRS)…Continue readinginnoVation Series – Research Article of the Month – April 2021

This month’s innovation series research article was published from our colleagues at the University of Cologne last week. Find out how you can optimize cardiac differentiation out of human induced pluripotent stem cells. This biomimetic approach is based on poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) substrates with similar stiffness to the native heart and a well-defined surface chemistry obtained…Continue readinginnoVation Series – Research Article of the Month – March 2021