Cell sheet engineering for heart tissue repair

Recently, myocardial tissue engineering has emerged as one of the most promising therapies for patients suffering from severe heart failure. Nevertheless, conventional methods in tissue engineering involving the seeding of cells into biodegradable scaffolds have intrinsic shortcomings, such as inflammatory reactions and fibrous tissue formation caused by scaffold degradation. On the other hand, we have developed cell sheet engineering as scaffoldless tissue engineering, and applied it for myocardial tissue engineering. Using temperature-responsive culture surfaces, cells can be harvested as intact sheets and cell-dense thick tissues are constructed by layering these cell sheets. Myocardial cell sheets non-invasively harvested from temperature-responsive culture surfaces are successfully layered, resulting in electrically communicative 3-dimensional (3-D) cardiac constructs. Transplantation of cell sheets onto damaged hearts improved heart function in several animal models. In this review, we summarize the development of myocardial tissue engineering using cell sheets harvested from temperature-responsive culture surfaces and discuss about future views.