Myocardial tissue engineering: creating a muscle patch for a wounded heart.

Cardiac tissue engineering promises to revolutionize the treatment of patients with end-stage heart failure and provide new solutions to the serious problem of heart donor shortage. By its broad definition, tissue engineering involves the construction of tissue equivalents from donor cells seeded within three-dimensional polymeric scaffolds, then culturing and implanting of the cell-seeded scaffolds to induce and direct the growth of new, healthy tissue. Here, we present an up-to-date summary of research studies in cardiac tissue engineering, with an emphasis on the critical design principles.