Stepwise Generation of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Cardiac Pericytes to Model Coronary Microvascular Dysfunction

Cardiac pericytes (PC), a major mural cell type maintaining homeostasis, integrity, and perfusion of the coronary microvasculature. Here, we report a stepwise, developmental trajectory-matched approach to generate first-of-its-kind cardiac PCs from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which were shown to transcriptionally and functionally resemble their primary counterparts. We performed gene expression profiling analysis using data obtained from RNA-seq of iPSC differentiated cardiac pericytes (PCs), PCs with sunitinib treatment, and PCs with sunitinib and thalidomide treatment.