From assaying therapeutic effects on cardiomyocyte cytotoxicity, calcium homeostasis, contractility, hypertrophy to modeling the complex underpinnings of cardiac disease to assessing new approaches to enhance the regenerative capacity of cardiac tissue, in vitro assays represent an indispensable tool. At Visikol, we have extensive experience generating both 2D and 3D models from primary cardiomyocytes to address your cardiac disease model or drug evaluation needs. Combined with our expertise in fluorescent labeling, image acquisition, and image analysis, this capability allows us to offer our Clients digestible, quantitative insights from large-scale screens.

The flexibility that primary cell isolation offers insofar as donor source enables for the assessment of not only wild type cardiomyocytes, but also cardiomyocytes sourced from specialized disease model donors, accomplished via diet modifications or genetic modifications.

When measuring nuanced changes to cellular components, such as in the context of cytoskeletal elements, image resolution is important. But in larger drug screens, the emphasis is on high-throughput. With both capabilities available, we can meet the cost, validation, and throughput needs of your project. 

2D vs 3D

Model choice is an important decision in undertaking any study, especially since expression of key disease indicators or therapeutic targets is often dependent on cell-ECM or cell-cell contacts achieved in 3D, but absent in 2D. In the context of cardiomyocytes specifically, we’ve found expression of atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP), who’s expression is associated with cardiomyocyte hypertrophy to only be correlative of disease state in 3D, but not 2D. Nevertheless, for more basic hit-identification screens, the higher throughput, lower cost nature of 2D model-based assays can still offer important insights. Therefore, we encourage our Clients to take advantage of a complementary project consultation phone call to discuss which model format best suits their specific needs.

By working with our Clients to understand the pathology of interest, we can implement existing analysis approaches or develop and validate customized metrics. For example, in the cardiomyocyte space, we have off-the-shelf hypertrophy, cytotoxicity, contractility, and temporal calcium flux assays ready to implement.