Role of Stem Cells in Cardiac Cell Therapy and Tissue Engineering

Background: In spite of promising results of conventional treatments for myocardial infarction, including medications, stent implantation, and coronary artery bypass grafting, the disease and its complications, especially heart failure, are highly prevalent because these methods could not reverse the cell loss, which is the main problem. Currently, heart transplantation, as the last option for treatment of heart failure, has major limitations including the low number of appropriate donors and underlying diseases in recipients. Materials and Methods: The present study is presented as a review paper. Using related keywords, including myocardial infarction, cell therapy, stem cell, cardiac tissue engineering, and clinical trials, studies published up to 2018 were collected from reliable databases, including Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, and Elsevier. Among potential candidates, those which were the most relevant to the purposes of the study were selected and evaluated. Results: The stem cells application for regeneration of damaged tissues is one of the great researchers’ achievements. In spite of various scientific, legal, and ethical concerns, several companies target stem cells transplantation for cardiac diseases in commercial way. There are many in situ, in vitro, and cell-loaded scaffold and cell sheet engineering studies in tissue engineering field. Conclusion: Despite the promising results of stem cells application, many challenges still lay ahead of this pathway including optimal cell, dosage, time and route administration selection, and the immune response modulations. Currently, extensive research is ongoing. In this regard, the successful results of various clinical trials made by different companies and health centers have led to commercialization of products. Some of them are addressed in the current review article. However, more research is needed to clarify the efficacy of these studies.