Developing models to learn how diabetes leads to heart failure

Development of a model of insulin-stimulated glucose transport in human cardiomyocytes

Heart failure is more common in people with diabetes - but we do not fully understand why. One challenge is that it's hard to reproduce the conditions found in the diabetic heart in the laboratory, so there is a lack of experimental tools to study this. It is now possible to engineer heart muscle cells from stem cells in the lab, which could be used to study how diabetes leads to heart failure. However, these cells differ from adult human heart cells in how they respond to the hormone insulin. Professor Gould and his team at the University of Glasgow have shown that this is probably because heart cells grown from stem cells do not contain a molecule called Glut4, which is important for glucose to enter cells. In this project, they will introduce Glut4 into the cells, and grow them in a solution that mimics the environment they would experience in a diabetic heart. The team hope that this will be a better way of simulating the conditions that lead to heart failure in diabetes, and will enable them to study how this affects the heart cells’ electrical activity, calcium levels and ability to contract. If this is successful, these modified cells could be an important resource for all researchers looking at ways to understand and prevent diabetes-induced heart failure, and therefore could also have the potential to partially replace the use of animals in this type of research.