High-Throughput Screening Platform in Postnatal Heart Cells and Chemical Probe Toolbox to Assess Cardiomyocyte Proliferation.

Restoring lost heart muscle is an attractive goal for cardiovascular regenerative medicine. One appealing strategy is the therapeutic stimulation of cardiomyocyte proliferation, which remains challenging due to available assay technologies capturing the complex biology. Here, a high-throughput-formatted phenotypic assay platform was established using rodent whole heart-derived cells to preserve the cellular environment of cardiomyocytes. Several readouts allowed the quantification of cycling cardiomyocytes, including a transgenic H2B-mCherry system for unequivocal, automated detection of cardiomyocyte nuclei. A chemical genetics approach revealed pronounced species differences and furnished pan-kinase inhibitors and as potent and robust inducers of endoreplication and acytokinetic mitosis. Combined profiling of the commonly used p38 MAPK inhibitors SB203580 (), SB239063 () and a novel set of skepinone-L () derivatives pointed to off-target effects beyond p38 that might be critical for effective cardiomyocyte cytokinesis. Kinome-focused screening eventually furnished TG003 () as a novel candidate for stimulating cardiomyocyte proliferation.

PMID: 34818008