Cardiovascular disease is a foremost cause of mortality worldwide, with an estimated 17.3 million deaths per year. A major obstacle for efficient drug discovery and development is the absence of physiologically relevant and predictive cell-based assays.
Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) hold great potential as disease models for cardiovascular diseases. Not only can they recapitulate physiological features of mature cardiomyocytes, they also retain a patient's genetic background and can be produced in the large quantities required for high throughput screening platforms.