Human cardiac tissue engineering: from pluripotent stem cells to heart repair

•Notable progress in cardiac differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs).•Lack of robust methods to mature hPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs) in vitro.•Engineered tissues from hPSC-CMs may advance CM maturation to near-adult levels.•Multiple methods developed to deliver hPSC-CMs to injured myocardium.•hPSC-CMs shown to electrically couple with host CMs in small and large animals.

Engineered cardiac tissues hold great promise for use in drug and toxicology screening, in vitro studies of human physiology and disease, and as transplantable tissue grafts for myocardial repair. In this review, we discuss recent progress in cell-based therapy and functional tissue engineering using pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes and we describe methods for delivery of cells into the injured heart. While significant hurdles remain, notable advances have been made in the methods to derive large numbers of pure human cardiomyocytes, mature their phenotype, and produce and implant functional cardiac tissues, bringing the field a step closer to widespread in vitro and in vivo applications.