Concise Review: Criteria for Chamber-Specific Categorization of Human Cardiac Myocytes Derived from Pluripotent Stem Cells

Human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (PSC-CMs) have great potential application in almost all areas of cardiovascular research. A current major goal of the field is to build on the past success of differentiation strategies to produce CMs with the properties of those originating from the different chambers of the adult human heart. With no anatomical origin or developmental pathway to draw on, the question of how to judge the success of such approaches and assess the chamber specificity of PSC-CMs has become increasingly important; commonly used methods have substantial limitations and are based on limited evidence to form such an assessment. In this article, we discuss the need for chamber-specific PSC-CMs in a number of areas as well as current approaches used to assess these cells on their likeness to those from different chambers of the heart. Furthermore, describing in detail the structural and functional features that distinguish the different chamber-specific human adult cardiac myocytes, we propose an evidence-based tool to aid investigators in the phenotypic characterization of differentiated PSC-CMs.