Biofabrication strategies for cardiac tissue engineering

Abstract

Biofabrication technologies hold the potential to provide high-throughput, easy-to-operate, and cost-effective systems that recapitulate complexities of the native heart. The size of the fabricated model, printing resolution, biocompatibility, and ease-of-fabrication are some of the major parameters that can be improved to develop more sophisticated cardiac models. Here, we review recent cardiac engineering technologies ranging from microscaled organoids, millimeter-scaled heart-on-a-chip platforms, in vitro ventricle models sized to the fetal heart, larger cardiac patches seeded with billions of cells, and associated biofabrication technologies used to produce these models. Finally, advancements that facilitate model translation are discussed, such as their application as carriers for bioactive components and cells in vivo or their capability for drug testing and disease modeling in vitro.