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(Circulation Research. 2006;98:573.)
© 2006 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorials

Electrical Coupling of Cardiac Myocyte Cell Sheets to the Heart

Thomas Eschenhagen, Wolfram H. Zimmermann, André G. Kléber

From the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology (T.E., W.H.Z.), University-Medical Center Hamburg Eppendorf, Germany; and the Department of Physiology (A.G.K.), University of Bern, Switzerland.

Correspondence to Thomas Eschenhagen, University Hospital Eppendorf, Institute of Experimental Pharmacology, Martinistrasse 52, 20246 Hamburg, Germany. E-mail t.eschenhagen@uke.uni-hamburg.de

See related article, pages 705–712

Key Words: tissue engineering • electrical coupling • impulse propagation • arrhythmia

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

The past 20 years have seen tremendous progress in the medical treatment of cardiac diseases, a progress that actually translated into decreased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in clinical practice.¹ Yet evidence accumulates that interventions intended to slow down the progression of chronic heart diseases have approached their limit. This may be one of the reasons why the recent progress in stem cell biology has stirred so much attention. In addition, recent studies suggesting the existence of cell populations in the adult organism that, albeit at a low rate and insufficiently, endogenously replace cardiac myocytes and endothelial and smooth muscle cells have challenged the dogma of the heart as a nonregenerating organ.^2–5 Such cell populations could be accessed in biopsies and principally serve as a source to replace cardiac myocytes and other cardiac cell types lost after myocardial infarction or other pathologies. Human embryonic stem cell lines, on the other hand, can nowadays be generated from human blastocysts (accessible from IVF leftovers⁶) at a high success rate and have been unambiguously shown to generate human cardiac myocytes.^7–9 Thus, despite many open questions and some controversy in the field (reviews in references ^10,11), cardiac regenerative therapy has become a realistic perspective.

But what to do with stem cells or their derivatives, given that means will be provided to generate them at sufficient numbers? The most straightforward strategy is to infuse or inject these cells into the injured heart and to develop methods to increase the fraction of cells that home and . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Related Article:

Pulsatile Cardiac Tissue Grafts Using a Novel Three-Dimensional Cell Sheet Manipulation Technique Functionally Integrates With the Host Heart, In Vivo

Akira Furuta, Shunichiro Miyoshi, Yuji Itabashi, Tatsuya Shimizu, Shinichiro Kira, Keiko Hayakawa, Nobuhiro Nishiyama, Kojiro Tanimoto, Yoko Hagiwara, Toshiaki Satoh, Keiichi Fukuda, Teruo Okano, and Satoshi Ogawa
Circ. Res. 2006 98: 705-712. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

This article has been cited by other articles:

				M Radisic, H Park, S Gerecht, C Cannizzaro, R Langer, and G Vunjak-Novakovic Biomimetic approach to cardiac tissue engineering Phil Trans R Soc B, August 29, 2007; 362(1484): 1357 - 1368. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]