The possibility of regenerative medicine for myocardial infarction and ischemic cardiomyopathy by using several stem cells

Improvement of therapy for severe heart failure due to ischemic cardiomyopathy and myocardial infarction is an important issue of cardiovascular medicine. Recently, regenerative therapy is seemed to be one of the possible ways to solve this problem. There are many potential cell sources for regenerative medicine, such as skeletal myocytes, bone marrow stem cells, endothelial progenitor cells, cardiac progenitor cells and embryonic stem (ES) cells. ES cells are highly proliferative and suitable for mass production and many protocols have been established to ensure selective cardiomyocyte induction. Current studies have successfully generated induced pluripotent stem(iPS) cells from human fibroblasts by the gene transfer of 4 transcription factors that are strongly expressed in ES cells: Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc. iPS cells can differentiate into all 3 germ layer-derived cells, including cardiomyocytes as same as ES cells and are syngeneic, indicating that they can become an ideal cell source for regenerative medicine.