Integrating Multi-Modal, Multi-Scale Models of Cardiovascular Disease Mechanisms

Human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived cardiac cells present an exciting model for providing mechanistic insights into heart disease. Human heart physiology differs in significant ways from animal models, and this workshop seeks to address the potential and challenges of hiPSC-derived models to understand disease mechanisms, especially when combined with in vivo animal and patient data to accelerate the development of therapies. We will discuss a roadmap for the use of hiPSC-models of heart disease for discovery and for validating the use of cell-lines from a diverse range of donors to help the field democratize pre-clinical research for human health.

The Workshop will bring together interdisciplinary researchers spanning in vitro and in vivo cardiovascular disease models to patient level clinical data. It aims to foster dialogue on the strengths of different scales and types of experimental data and discuss a roadmap for how complementary, multi-modal data types and models can be integrated in silico to produce integrative knowledge greater than could be discovered from one data stream or model alone. We will have sessions dedicated to methodologies and applications for:

• Unravelling phenotypes and mechanisms of disease at the cellular level
• Multi-scale mechanobiology of cardiac physiology and pathology
• Sex differences in cardiac disease
• Mapping genotypes to phenotypes

A key feature of this Workshop is that we have invited bioengineers, biologists, and clinicians to stimulate cross-model conversations and further the utility of non-animal models in disease mechanism research. Each session will span in vitro and in vivo research to anchor dialogue on the challenges and opportunities for integrating multi-scale, multi-modal data from different models and systems.