Cardiac cell therapy

Class

Cell-based regenerative therapy

Cardiac cell therapy refers to a family of regenerative approaches that introduce living cells into damaged heart tissue with the goal of restoring function lost after events such as myocardial infarction or in chronic heart failure. The underlying rationale is that adult heart muscle cells, cardiomyocytes, have very limited capacity to divide and regenerate; once a region of muscle dies from lack of blood flow, it is typically replaced by non-contractile scar tissue rather than new muscle. Cell therapies attempt to address this in two broad ways. Some products, such as cardiomyocytes derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), aim to directly replace lost muscle mass by engrafting into the damaged region. Others, including mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs), cardiosphere-derived cells, and cardiac progenitor cells, act less by becoming new heart muscle and more by releasing signaling factors that reduce inflammation, promote new blood vessel formation, and support the heart's own limited repair processes. These approaches are studied broadly in ischemic heart disease and heart failure with reduced pumping capacity, contexts where the underlying problem is an irreversible loss of functional muscle tissue and where no existing drug class restores contractile mass directly.