Direct cellular reprogramming for cardiac repair and regeneration

Direct Cardiac Reprogramming: Advances in Cardiac Regeneration

Heart disease is one of the lead causes of death worldwide. Many forms of heart disease, including myocardial infarction and pressure-loading cardiomyopathies, result in irreversible cardiomyocyte death. Activated fibroblasts respond to cardiac injury by forming scar tissue, but ultimately this response fails to restore cardiac function. Unfortunately, the human heart has little regenerative ab...

Direct Reprogramming—The Future of Cardiac Regeneration?

Today, the only available curative therapy for end stage congestive heart failure (CHF) is heart transplantation. This therapeutic option is strongly limited by declining numbers of available donor hearts and by restricted long-term performance of the transplanted graft. The disastrous prognosis for CHF with its restricted therapeutic options has led scientists to develop different concepts of ...

Reprogramming for cardiac regeneration

Treatment of cardiovascular diseases remains challenging considering the limited regeneration capacity of the heart muscle. Developments of reprogramming strategies to create in vitro and in vivo cardiomyocytes have been the focus point of a considerable amount of research in the past decades. The choice of cells to employ, the state-of-the-art methods for different reprogramming strategies, an...

Direct reprogramming for cardiac regeneration: from dream to reality.

Direct reprogramming of endogenous fibroblasts into functional cardiomyocytes to regenerate the heart after myocardial infarction (MI) has long been a dream. A few years ago, this would have been considered by most to be science fiction. Certainly, the most optimistic scientists would probably categorize this as “highly unlikely to ever work.” And yet, 2 papers,1,2 including one in this issue o...

Cellular reprogramming: a new avenue to cardiac regeneration?