Cardiovascular diseases are major contributors to global mortality.
Myocardial infarction represents a significant complication of one such disease that
affects a very large population worldwide, with the ischemic region and the resultant
scar tissue generated reducing cardiac function and becoming a focus for recurrent
infarctions. Several stem cell therapy approaches aimed at regenerating the nonfunctional
myocardium have emerged using multipotent and pluripotent stem cells.
However, many of the pre-clinical and clinical trials have not yielded the anticipated
outcomes, and so different strategies are now being explored to achieve regeneration.
The failure of these stem cell therapies may be partially attributable to the dearth of
information on human cardiac developmental and regenerative pathways. However,
numerous studies have investigated cardiogenesis and heart regeneration in model
organisms, which have provided considerable insights into the processes of cardiac
development, and other studies on the differentiation of pluripotent stem cells have
largely corroborated these findings. Here we review heart development in different
organisms, supplemented with insights from stem cell biology and clinical studies,
which will underpin the development of effective stem cell treatments for myocardial
infarction and other cardiac insults.
Keywords: Cardiogenesis, Chicken, CVD, EPC, Fruit fly, HSC, Human,
Mesoderm, Mouse, MSC, Myocardial infarct, Regeneration, Stem cells, Toad,
Zebrafish.
