Cardiomyocytes from stem cells: what can we do with them?

Cardiomyocytes are the cells in the heart that make it contract. There are several different kinds of cardiomyocytes in the heart. By investigating how they form (or differentiate) in the early embryo, it has been possible to develop ways of making them from some types of stem cell. In this chapter we discuss how they might be used in biomedical, clinical, and pharmaceutical research. Although the focus is on cardiomyocytes, the same principles of how we find out how to make them from stem cells and what we can do with them are applicable to many other types of cells: neurons from the brain and central nervous system, or, for instance, cells of the liver, lungs, or kidney. Differentiation of nearly all of these from stem cells was greatly facilitated by basic research on their formation in embryonic development. Their application in biomedical, clinical, and pharmaceutical research, likewise, has many parallels both in the potential applications and challenges that need to be made for clinical translation in tissue repair. We thus use the heart as an example, with counterparts in other tissues.