Cardiac Tissue Engineering

Acute and chronic heart failure and complex congenital heart disease result in inadequate cardiac output for which in vitro tissue engineering of implantable, functional cardiac tissue is an attractive alternative to heart transplantation, the gold-standard therapeutic modality which is severely limited by a donor organ shortage. A variety of strategies to generate, optimize, vascularize and implement engineered heart tissue (EHT) have been proposed and evaluated. Here, we review the patented methods of various research groups and investigators to generate EHT as well as recent advances in the development of vascularized and human EHT.