Cardiac regenerative medicine: At the crossroad of microRNA function and biotechnology

There is an urgent need to develop new therapeutic strategies to stimulate cardiac repair after damage, such as myocardial infarction. Already for more than a century scientist are intrigued by studying the regenerative capacity of the heart. While moving away from the old classification of the heart as a post-mitotic organ, and being inspired by the stem cell research in other scientific fields, mainly three different strategies arose in order to develop regenerative medicine, namely; the use of cardiac stem cells, reprogramming of fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes or direct stimulation of endogenous cardiomyocyte proliferation. MicroRNAs, known to play a role in orchestrating cell fate processes such as proliferation, differentiation and reprogramming, gained a lot of attention in this context the latest years. Indeed, several research groups have independently demonstrated that microRNA-based therapy shows promising results to induce heart tissue regeneration and improve cardiac pump function after myocardial injury. Nowadays, a whole new biotechnology field has been unveiled to investigate the possibilities for efficient, safe and specific delivery of microRNAs towards the heart.