In addition to its therapeutic potential, engineered cardiovascular tissue could be used for modeling cardiovascular diseases and drug testing. For example, human-induced pluripotent stem cellderived cardiomyocytes are widely used to study the characteristics of Dilated Cardiomyopathy, Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, Long QT Syndrome, Brugada Syndrome, Short QT syndrome, Myocardial Infarction, and Cardiotoxicity 6 . Engineered heart valves are used in modeling and treating Prosthetic Heart Valves 7 . The human umbilical cords and placentas, collected during clinical cesarean section procedures, could be used to model Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation cannulation in artificial placenta technology 8 . These strategies offer alternative approaches to in vivo studies and could potentially reduce the time and cost of studying cardiovascular diseases while maintaining key disease-specific pathological phenotypes.In summary, advances in engineering cardiac tissue are important for in vitro disease modeling and drug screening, as well as for various clinical therapies. On the other hand, recent mechanistic findings in endogenous cardiac regeneration 9 may offer a new direction for developing new engineering approaches to treat cardiovascular diseases.
Nguyen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.