Regulatory effect of anisotropic structure on cardiomyocyte maturation

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide. Due to the limited regenerative capacity of the adult heart, treatments based on human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) have become the focus of a great deal of research. Human pluripotent stem cell–derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs) can provide an ideal cell source for CVD model construction, cardiac tissue repair, and drug cardiotoxicology research. However, the immaturity of hPSC-CMs seriously restricts its clinical application. The maturation of cardiomyocytes depends on the orderly arrangement of myofilaments and the increase of the expression of connexin, so the geometric regulation of bioengineering substrate is one of the keys to the maturation of engineered myocardial tissue. This review focuses on the key indicators of anisotropic structures provided by biomaterials to improve the maturation characteristics of cardiomyocytes, so as to promote the maturation of cardiomyocytes, and looks forward to the development direction in this field.

Keywords

• Cardiovascular disease
• human pluripotent stem cells
• cardiomyocytes
• bioengineering
• anisotropic structure