Phasic modulation of Wnt signaling enhances cardiac differentiation in human pluripotent stem cells by recapitulating developmental ontogeny

Abstract

Cardiomyocytes (CMs) derived from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) offer immense value in studying cardiovascular regenerative medicine. However, intrinsic biases and differential responsiveness of hPSCs towards cardiac differentiation pose significant technical and logistic hurdles that hamper human cardiomyocyte studies. Tandem modulation of canonical and non-canonical Wnt signaling pathways may play a crucial role in cardiac development that can efficiently generate cardiomyocytes from pluripotent stem cells. Our Wnt signaling expression profiles revealed that phasic modulation of canonical/non-canonical axis enabled orderly recapitulation of cardiac developmental ontogeny. Moreover, evaluation of 8 hPSC lines showed marked commitment towards cardiac-mesoderm during the early phase of differentiation, with elevated levels of canonical Wnts (Wnt3 and 3a) and Mesp1. Whereas continued activation of canonical Wnts was counterproductive, its discrete inhibition during the later phase of cardiac differentiation was accompanied by significant up-regulation of non-canonical Wnt expression (Wnt5a and 11) and enhanced Nkx2.5+ (up to 98%) populations. These Nkx2.5+ populations transited to contracting cardiac troponin T-positive CMs with up to 80% efficiency. Our results suggest that timely modulation of Wnt pathways would transcend intrinsic differentiation biases of hPSCs to consistently generate functional CMs that could facilitate their scalable production for meaningful clinical translation towards personalized regenerative medicine.