Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Heart failure occurs when the muscle cells in the heart called cardiomyocytes become diseased or damaged. The heart can no longer contract strongly enough to supply the body with sufficient blood. As a result, heart failure patients experience high mortality and a reduced quality of life with secondary health conditions. Heart failure affects over 1 million Canadians and is not curable with current therapies. This has driven research to find ways to generate functional cardiomyocytes from stem cells that can be implanted into the heart to restore function, or used to test drugs that will restore contractile function or regenerate heart muscle. Discovery of new strategies to generate functional cardiomyocytes requires methods to measure the force generated by the cells, but tools to measure cell contraction forces are not widely available or easy to use. This has hindered the rapid identification of strategies to produce functional heart cells. To address this unmet need, I have developed a system that uses focused high-frequency sound waves to measure the rate, rhythm, and force of contraction by cardiomyocytes derived from stem cells. I will validate this completely novel approach against gold standards, and demonstrate that it can be used with a wide variety of standard and advanced cell culture formats. We expect that the ease of use and versatility of our system will facilitate commercialization and rapid adoption of the technology by end users in cell biology labs and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, ultimately enabling the discovery of new cell and drug therapies to cure heart disease.