Beating in a dish: new hopes for cardiomyocyte regeneration

Functional human cardiomyocytes hold great promise in cell transplantation-based therapy to treat many heart diseases. To meet this devastating and clinical need, researchers are infatuated with developing novel technologies and methodologies to efficiently generate cardiomyocytes through either stem cell differentiation or cell lineage transdifferentiation. Though exciting progress has been made, challenges remain to be addressed before the translation from bench side to bed side can be fulfilled.