The Effect of Doxorubicin on Viability and Morphology of Human Embryonic Stem Cell-derived Cardiomyocytes

Abstract

In spite of serious cardiotoxicity side-effects, doxorubicin is frequently used for treatment of several types of cancers. Isolated human adult cardiomyocytes could be the best model for assessing drug-induced cardiotoxicity, while harvesting mature cardiomyocytes is restricted by some limitations such as biopsy size, cell numbers, viability, proliferative capacity and their disability to be passaged as a cell line. In the present study, human embryonic stem cell (hESC)-derived cardiomyocytes applied as a model for evaluation of doxorubicin cardiotoxicity. In this process, cardiogenic differentiated hESCs spheroids were exposed to different concentrations of doxorubicin for 24, 48 and 72 hours. The viability of spheroids as well as their morphology was assessed as important criterion of cardiotoxicity. Findings of the study showed that the viability of spheroids was significantly reduced at doses of 3 and 30 µM (P<0.05). Moreover, cell morphology was changed in the presence of same doses. Overall hESC-derived cardiomyocytes (hESC-CMs) could be a useful in vitro model for evaluating drug-induced toxicity.