User:Viennguyen1125/sandbox

Background
Heart failure is one of the leading causes of death. In 2013, an estimate of 17.3 million deaths per year out of the 54 million total deaths was caused by cardiovascular diseases, meaning that 31.5% of the world's total death was caused by this. Often, the only viable treatment for end-stage heart failure is organ transplantation. Currently organ supply is insufficient to meet the demand, which presents a large limitation in an end-stage treatment plan. A theoretical alternative to traditional transplantation processes is the engineering of personalized bioartificial hearts. Researchers have had many successful advances in the engineering of cardiovascular tissue and have looked towards using decellularized and recellularized cadaveric hearts in order to create a functional organ. Decellularization-recellularization involves using a cadaveric heart, removing the cellular contents while maintaining the protein matrix (decellularization), and subsequently facilitating growth of appropriate cardiovascular tissue inside the remaining matrix (recellularization).

Over the past years, researchers found cardiac stem cells that have been residing in the heart itself. This discovery sparked the idea of regenerating the heart cells by taking the stem cells inside the heart and reprogrammed them into cardiac tissues. The importance of these stem cells are: self-renewal, the ability to differentiate into cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells and smooth vascular muscle cells, and clonogenicity. These stem cells are capable of becoming myocytes, which are for stabilizing the topography of the intercellular components as well as to help control the size and shape of the heart, as well as vascular cells, which serves as a cell reservoir for the turnover and the maintenance of the mesenchymal tissues. Ebryotic stem cells are shown to be able to form into other types of cells, however no clinical studies has used this for myocardial regeneration yet to avoid the possibility of the formation of teratoma. at the moment, autologous cells are the most used in clinical trials, such as bone marrow, to avoid tissue rejection.

copied from "Bioartificial Heart"