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Biomatrices for Heart Regeneration and Cardiac Tissue Modelling In Vitro
I Kulvinskiene1, R Aldonyte1, R Miksiunas1
1Department of Regenerative Medicine, State Research Institute Centre for Innovative Medicine, Vilnius, Lithuania.
Insights
Cardiac tissue engineering faces challenges in heart regeneration. This review explores current cells, biomaterials, and scaffolds for in vitro cardiac tissue development and future regenerative medicine applications.
Area of Science:
- Biomedical Engineering
- Regenerative Medicine
- Cardiovascular Research
Background:
- Heart failure is a growing global health issue with limited human cardiac tissue regeneration.
- Engineering functional cardiac tissue for therapeutic applications remains a significant challenge.
- Effective cardiac tissue bioengineering requires specialized cells and biomaterials to mimic the native microenvironment.
Purpose of the Study:
- To provide a comprehensive overview of current cardiac tissue engineering strategies.
- To analyze the advantages and disadvantages of established cell sources and biomaterials.
- To review the state-of-the-art and future directions in cardiac tissue engineering.
Main Methods:
- Review of recently employed cells for cardiac tissue engineering.
- Analysis of 2D and 3D biomatrices, hydrogels, and scaffolds.
- Evaluation of cell cultivation technologies and biomatrix applications.
Main Results:
- Advances in stem cell science offer diverse cell resources for cardiac reconstruction.
- Various biomaterials and scaffolds are being developed to recreate the cardiac extracellular microenvironment.
- Established biosystems provide insights into effective and safe cardiac tissue reconstruction.
Conclusions:
- Developing robust cells and advanced biomaterials is crucial for successful cardiac tissue engineering.
- Further research is needed to overcome challenges in in vitro cardiac tissue development.
- This review highlights key advancements and future prospects for regenerative medicine in cardiology.
Abstract:
Cardiac muscle is the hardest working muscle in the body, pumping approximately 70 g of blood with every heartbeat, circulating 9500 l of blood daily and contracting over 3 billion times during the average human's life. Heart failure - a heterogeneous syndrome - is a major and increasing health care problem worldwide and a leading cause of hospitalization and morbidity in elderly. Adequate heart tissue regeneration in human is lacking. Challenges to engineer heart tissue and employ it in vitro or in regenerative medicine remain to be solved. First of all, cardiac tissue bioengineering requires robust and powerful cells capable of differentiating into cardiomyogenic lineages in combination with effective, safe and highly specialized biomaterials, hydrogels and/or scaffolds for recreating the native extracellular microenvironment. Advances in stem cell and biomaterial science already provided an increasing array of cell resources, their cultivation technologies and biomatrices for efficient and safe cardiac tissue reconstruction. In order to develop new cardiac tissue mimicking technologies in vitro, it is necessary to analyze the advantages and drawbacks of already established biosystems. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of recently employed cells, 2D and 3D biomatrices for cardiac tissue engineering and review the current state-of-the-art in this field as well as future directions.
