Hi, I'm an MSc student in cardiovascular research who's just come across a paper by Professor Bursac at Duke University; "Cardiopatch platform enables maturation and scale-up of human pluripotent stem cell-derived engineered heart tissues".

It shows some real promise to cardiopatch development from cardiac progenitor cells derived from human stem cells. Their data seems impressive with robust maintenance of structure and function of the patch after implantation.

But there are still some unanswered questions;

1. How to get past the poor electrical coupling between the patch and the host heart possibly due to that large area of non-cardiac tissue in the way? P.S. Does anyone know what this area of tissue s likely to be. Possibly just a mess of dead cells and in-grown blood vessels?

2. There's still the problem of alloimmunisation and since this patch was not tried in human patients, graft rejection is still a concern.

3. They reported some data on contractile forces on the larger Mega and Giga patches but were they relevant to something closer to a human heart as these larger patches were not tested in vivo?

I'd really like to start a discussion about this paper as it shows some exciting developments in the field of cardiac tissue engineering but there are still some unanswered questions. If anyone has any opinions on the data or the methodology in this paper, I would be very keen to hear them please. Thank you.