Human Pluripotent Stem Cells for Modeling of Anticancer Therapy-Induced Cardiotoxicity and Cardioprotective Drug Discovery

Anticancer chemotherapies have been shown to produce severe side effects, with cardiotoxicity from anthracycline being the most notable. Identifying risk factors for anticancer therapy-induced cardiotoxicity in cancer patients as well as understanding its underlying mechanism is essential to improving clinical outcomes of chemotherapy treatment regimens. Moreover, cardioprotective agents against anticancer therapy-induced cardiotoxicity are scarce. Human induced pluripotent stem cell technology offers an attractive platform for validation of potential single nucleotide polymorphism with increased risk for cardiotoxicity. Successful validation of risk factors and mechanism of cardiotoxicity would aid the development of such platform for novel drug discovery and facilitate the practice of personalized medicine.