The use of human cardiac tissue in biophysical research: The risks of translation

There has been increasing enthusiasm for biomedical research that focuses directly on human pathophysiology, in part fueled by the recent NIH roadmap initiative. While this approach has considerable merit, a myopic and primary focus on human disease and on human tissue introduces a plethora of research risks and concerns that could potentially complicate data interpretation and retard scientific progress. While some of these issues are generic when one extrapolates from animal models to the human circumstance, others are more specific to the cardiovascular system in general and to the study of cardiocyte biology in particular. This brief review will highlight some of these.