Tissue-engineered heart chambers as a platform technology for drug discovery and disease modeling

Current drug screening approaches are incapable of fully detecting and characterizing drug effectiveness and toxicity of human cardiomyocytes. The pharmaceutical industry uses mathematical models, cell lines, and in vivo models. Many promising drugs are abandoned early in development, and some cardiotoxic drugs reach humans leading to drug recalls. Therefore, there is an unmet need to have more reliable and predictive tools for drug discovery and screening applications. Biofabrication of functional cardiac tissues holds great promise for developing a faithful 3D in vitro disease model, optimizing drug screening efficiencies enabling precision medicine. Different fabrication techniques including molding, pull spinning and 3D bioprinting were used to develop tissue-engineered heart chambers. The big challenge is to effectively organize cells into tissue with structural and physiological features resembling native tissues. Some advancements have been made in engineering miniaturized heart chambers that resemble a living pump for drug screening and disease modeling applications. Here, we review the currently developed tissue-engineered heart chambers and discuss challenges and prospects.