Engineering Cardiovascular Regeneration

The human heart has very limited regenerative capacity, making the loss of heart muscle tissue during myocardial infarction essentially irreversible. Regenerative medicine aims at promoting the formation of new functional heart muscle in an injured heart, either by stimulating myocyte proliferation, formation of myocytes from preexisting stem cells, direct reprogramming of fibroblasts into myocytes, or adding new muscle tissue from exogenous stem cell sources. Recent advances in stem cell research make these goals more realistic. This review provides a short overview about different approaches for cardiovascular regeneration, stem cell sources, and modes of application, focusing on current cardiac tissue engineering techniques and their way towards clinical application.