Background: Cardiovascular disease is the leading global cause of morbidity and mortality. New technologies are needed to improve mechanistic understanding and inform therapeutic strategies. Human-centric cardiac simulations show great promise; however, existing cellular models can reproduce only a few arrhythmia-driving behaviors and show important discrepancies with experimental data. We aimed to develop a new model overcoming this lack of generality, which markedly limits the predictivity and translational utility of virtual cardiomyocytes.
Methods: We developed T-World, a novel virtual human cardiomyocyte, using data-driven differential equations to describe sex-specific excitation-contraction coupling, mechanical contraction, β-adrenergic signaling, and its effects on cellular targets. The model contains several key innovations, including a new approach to coupling L-type calcium channels and ryanodine receptors, with updated calcium-dependent-inactivation of the former and novel calcium-induced refractoriness and complete reparameterization of the latter. We also redeveloped the sodium-potassium pump and made major improvements to the sodium-calcium exchanger formulation.
Results: T-World shows broad agreement with experimental data on rate-dependent action potential (AP), calcium handling, and contraction properties. Extensively validated on independent data, T-World demonstrates strong predictive performance, for example, in drug-induced AP changes. The model reproduces the effects of sympathetic stimulation, including AP duration shortening and increased calcium-transient amplitude and contractility. Importantly, it recapitulates for the first time all key cellular mechanisms driving life-threatening arrhythmias (early and delayed afterdepolarizations, alternans, and steep S1-S2 restitution), including experimentally observed responses to interventions such as sympathetic activation, SERCA (sarco/endoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ ATPase) inhibition, and AP prolongation. Combined with the model's ability to simulate physiological sex-specific differences in electrophysiology, this revealed increased proclivity of female cardiomyocytes to early afterdepolarizations and steep restitution of AP duration.
Conclusions: T-World is a highly general and predictive open-source computer model of a human ventricular cardiomyocyte, suitable for multiscale research studies investigating determinants of arrhythmogenesis.
Keywords: action potentials; arrhythmias, cardiac; cardiovascular diseases; morbidity; myocytes, cardiac.