Heart regenerative medicine: from cardiomyocyte generation to bioengineering

Recently, we reported a scalable, robust, and integrated differentiation protocol for large-scale production of almost pure (∼90%) functional contracting cardiomyocytes (CMs) from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) in a stirred suspension bioreactor in the presence of an optimized cocktail of small molecules under defined conditions within 10 days. Moreover, we found a cocktail of small molecules that led to self-renewal of hPSC-derived cardiac progenitors (CPs). This provides us an unlimited source of CMs and CPs for biomedical applications and tissue engineering. Here, I describe the development of these cells and their application for drug discovery and regenerative medicine as well as generation of a humanized rat heart

Keywords:

Cardiomyocytes , Human pluripotent stem cells , Bioengineering , Tissue engineering