ABSTRACT
Although heart transplantation is the ultimate therapy for the treatment of severe heart failure, it has not been widely examined, because it requires donor hearts, and the inadequate supply of donor hearts is often a major problem everywhere in the world. As a result, the current challenge in cardiology is how to reserve pump failure by cell transplantation or regenerative medicine. Recent studies have shown that transplanted fetal cardiomyocytes can survive in heart scar tissue and that the transplanted cells limit scar expansion and prevent post-infarction heart failure. Transplantation of cultured cardiomyocytes into damaged myocardium has been proposed as a future method of treating heart failure, 1 , 2 but this revolutionary concept remains unfeasible in clinical settings because of the difficulty of obtaining donor fetal hearts. A cardiomyogenic cell line has long been awaited, and such a line might be capable of substituting for fetal cardiomyocytes in this therapy.
