Biomaterials and cells for cardiac tissue engineering: Current choices

- Cardiac tissue engineering offers an advanced approach to curing heart diseases.
- Various allogenic and autologous cells sources are currently used in trials.
- Scaffolds are fabricated and employed in different ways to support the seeded cells.
- Commercially, engineered cardiac valves and blood vessel grafts are available.

The major purpose of cardiac tissue engineering is to engineer cells on scaffolds and use it as a substitute to infarcted cardiac cells. With an ever-increasing risk of cardiac diseases there is an increasing need to have a stable and sustainable approach to cure such ailments. This review provides a comprehensive update on the cell sources and biomaterials essential for cardiac tissue engineering, ensuring their biocompatibility under a variety of conditions. Cells can be obtained from allogenic or autologous sources. The cells sources described in this paper are cardiomyocytes, a variety of stem cells, fibroblasts and parthenogenetic cells. Scaffolds to seed the cells should fulfill various criteria, the most important ones being non-immunogenicity, biodegradability and native tissue mimicking. There are several kinds of scaffolds including hydrogels, prefabricated matrices, decellularized scaffolds and cell sheets. Using this knowledge of cell sources and scaffold fabrication, production of various tissue engineered products is possible.