Abstract
Major cardiovascular events including myocardial infarction (MI) continue to dominate morbidity rates in the developed world. Although multiple device therapies and various pharmacological agents have been shown to improve patient care and reduce mortality rates, clinicians and researchers alike still lack a true panacea to regenerate damaged cardiac tissue. Over the previous two to three decades, cardiovascular stem cell therapies have held great promise. Several stem cell-based approaches have now been shown to improve ventricular function and are documented in preclinical animal models as well as phase I and phase II clinical trials. More recently, the cardiac progenitor cell has begun to gain momentum as an ideal candidate for stem cell therapy in heart disease. Here, we will highlight the most recent advances in cardiac stem/progenitor cell biology in regard to both the basics and applied settings.
Highlights
Due to marginal improvements in heart failure treatments, a greater number of elderly patients are living longer with chronic heart failure
The cardiac progenitor cells (CPCs) derived from the First Heart Field (FHF) and Second Heart Field (SHF) will go on to give rise to many of the intermediates that are responsible for generating all the major cell types in the heart, including CMs, vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs), arterial and venous endothelial cells (ECs), fibroblasts, and conductive cells of the cardiac conduction system
In order to employ the correct cell type for regenerative purposes against heart disease, it is imperative to understand the role of the CPCs in development
Summary
Due to marginal improvements in heart failure treatments, a greater number of elderly patients are living longer with chronic heart failure. Emerging scientific evidence has begun to emphasize the use of cardiac progenitor cells (CPCs), rather than differentiated CMs, as a novel treatment strategy for cardiac regeneration This is due to the notion that CPCs, which imply both embryonic/developmental and adult CPCs, are more capable of engrafting to host myocardium, in part by their strong proliferative potential and their ability to generate multiple cardiac derivatives (Figure 1). Provide long-term therapeutic effects, the CPC therapy may bring the new challenges of obtaining efficient and committed differentiation of CPCs into CMs in vivo under pathological conditions, such as the ischemic and/or injured microenvironment [3, 5] In this minireview, we discuss briefly the recent advances and knowledge of CPCs in basic biology and clinical settings. For a more in-depth review of cell-free and cell-based approaches to cardiac regeneration, we refer the reader to the following reviews [6, 7]
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