Generation of Human Cardiomyocytes for Cardiac Regenerative Therapies: Differentiation and Direct Reprogramming

The generation of functional human cardiomyocytes carries the potential of replacing damaged, malformed, or congenitally absent cardiac tissue as a definitive cure for cardiac disease. Furthermore, patient-specific cardiomyocytes may yield useful in vitro models of heart tissue for disease investigation, drug development and personalized therapy evaluation. This field has experienced rapid advances in the past few years. Nearly pure populations of cardiomyocytes have been generated from human pluripotent stem cells and new strategies to generate cardiomyocytes from somatic cells have been introduced. Here we review the latest breakthroughs in cardiomyocyte differentiation from human pluripotent stem cells and the creation of cardiomyocytes by direct reprogramming strategies, as well as discuss their limitations.