Purpose of review: Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality worldwide. Pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (PSC-CMs) have great potential to treat heart disease, owing to their capacity of engraftment and remuscularization in the host heart after transplantation. In the current review, we provide an overview of PSC-CMs for clinical transplantation.
Recent findings: Studies have shown that PSC-CMs can survive, engraft, and form gap junctions after transplantation, with functional benefit. Engrafted PSC-CMs matured gradually in host hearts. Only in a large animal model, transient ventricular arrhythmias were detected, mainly because of the ectopic pacing from the grafted PSC-CMs. Although intense immunosuppression is unavoidable in xenotransplantation, immunosuppression remains necessary for MHC-matched allogenic non-human primate PSC-CMs transplantation. This review offers insights on how PSC-CMs contribute to functional benefit after transplantation to injured non-human primate hearts. We believe that PSC-CM transplantation represents a potentially novel treatment for ischemic heart diseases, provided that several technological and biological limitations can be overcome.
Keywords: Cardiomyocyte; Cell therapy; Heart disease; Pluripotent stem cell; Transplantation.