Myocardial Repair and Restoration

Abstract

Over 19 million people in the USA and Europe alone suffer with heart failure, causing 230,000 deaths each year incurring tremendous costs. Heart transplantation remains the definitive treatment for end-stage heart failure, but this therapy is invasive, costly, and excludes some patients who are not candidates for transplantation and others for whom an organ is not available. New therapies are needed to treat the millions of patients with debilitating heart failure worldwide. Myocardial engineering represents a realistic strategy for reversing the deleterious effects of what has until now been considered terminal damage to the heart. This chapter reviews potential sources of cardiac-specific stem cells, efforts to enhance their engraftment and survival in damaged tissues, their incorporation into tissue patches, and recent progress made in developing methods to assess functional improvement in engineered myocardium.