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Updated: May 4, 2026

Construction of Defined Human Engineered Cardiac Tissues to Study Mechanisms of Cardiac Cell Therapy
Published on: March 1, 2016
Engineered heart tissue: Design considerations and the state of the art
Ilhan Gokhan, Thomas S Blum1, Stuart G Campbell
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
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Originally developed more than 20 years ago, engineered heart tissue (EHT) has become an important tool in cardiovascular research for applications such as disease modeling and drug screening. Innovations in biomaterials, stem cell biology, and bioengineering, among other fields, have enabled EHT technologies to recapitulate many aspects of cardiac physiology and pathophysiology. While initial EHT designs were inspired by the isolated-trabecula culture system, current designs encompass a variety of formats, each of which have unique strengths and limitations. In this review, we describe the most common EHT formats, and then systematically evaluate each aspect of their design, emphasizing the rational selection of components for each application.
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