[December 2021 Newsletter] Calcium Flux Detection in Engineered Muscle Tissues

 

Happy Holidays!

Thank you for letting us be a part of your journey to create more mature human stem cell models and develop new medicines. We look forward to helping you achieve greater success in 2022!

Stay safe and take care,
The Curi Bio Team


Detection of Calcium Flux in Engineered Muscle Tissues

The movement of calcium ions in and out of the cell during muscle contraction and relaxation can provide meaningful information about the maturity, as well as disease states, of muscle tissues. In this experiment, Engineered Muscle Tissues (EMTs) made from iPSC-derived skeletal muscle cells were casted on Mantarray Plates and then loaded with Fluo-4 AM dye that binds calcium ions and labels them with a fluorescent tag.

Tissues were electrically paced to induce calcium mediated muscle contractions while video was recorded on an epifluorescence microscope. Analyzing a region of interest inside the two posts yields a trace of fluorescence changes over time as the EMT contracts and relaxes.

Control and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy tissues show similar calcium handling kinetics two weeks after casting, suggesting that more developmental time may be needed to measure calcium flux abnormalities in these isogenic cell lines.


Recent News

$10M Raised in Series A Funding Round

Curi Bio announced today the closing of its Series A funding round with an oversubscribed $10 million raised. New investors include UTC Investment and DS Asset Management, joining current investor and Series A lead Dynamk Capital.

Webinar Replay

Mantarray: Scalable Human-relevant 3D-Engineered Cardiac and Skeletal Muscle Tissues for Safety and Efficacy Studies

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