Cardiogenesis and Repair: Insights from Development and Clinical Trials

Cardiovascular diseases are major contributors to global mortality. Myocardial infarction represents a significant complication of one such disease that affects a very large population worldwide, with the ischemic region and the resultant scar tissue generated reducing cardiac function and becoming a focus for recurrent infarctions. Several stem cell therapy approaches aimed at regenerating the nonfunctional myocardium have emerged using multipotent and pluripotent stem cells. However, many of the pre-clinical and clinical trials have not yielded the anticipated outcomes, and so different strategies are now being explored to achieve regeneration. The failure of these stem cell therapies may be partially attributable to the dearth of information on human cardiac developmental and regenerative pathways. However, numerous studies have investigated cardiogenesis and heart regeneration in model organisms, which have provided considerable insights into the processes of cardiac development, and other studies on the differentiation of pluripotent stem cells have largely corroborated these findings. Here we review heart development in different organisms, supplemented with insights from stem cell biology and clinical studies, which will underpin the development of effective stem cell treatments for myocardial infarction and other cardiac insults.

Keywords: Cardiogenesis, Chicken, CVD, EPC, Fruit fly, HSC, Human, Mesoderm, Mouse, MSC, Myocardial infarct, Regeneration, Stem cells, Toad, Zebrafish.