Cardiac regenerative medicine: At the crossroad of microRNA function and biotechnology

Noncoding RNA Res. 2017 Mar 15;2(1):27-37. doi: 10.1016/j.ncrna.2017.03.001. eCollection 2017 Mar.

Abstract

There is an urgent need to develop new therapeutic strategies to stimulate cardiac repair after damage, such as myocardial infarction. Already for more than a century scientist are intrigued by studying the regenerative capacity of the heart. While moving away from the old classification of the heart as a post-mitotic organ, and being inspired by the stem cell research in other scientific fields, mainly three different strategies arose in order to develop regenerative medicine, namely; the use of cardiac stem cells, reprogramming of fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes or direct stimulation of endogenous cardiomyocyte proliferation. MicroRNAs, known to play a role in orchestrating cell fate processes such as proliferation, differentiation and reprogramming, gained a lot of attention in this context the latest years. Indeed, several research groups have independently demonstrated that microRNA-based therapy shows promising results to induce heart tissue regeneration and improve cardiac pump function after myocardial injury. Nowadays, a whole new biotechnology field has been unveiled to investigate the possibilities for efficient, safe and specific delivery of microRNAs towards the heart.

Publication types

  • Review