Collagen-Based Engineered Heart Muscle

Abstract

Cardiac muscle engineering has evolved over nearly 20 years from a scientific oddity to a mainstream technology with a wide range of applications. Of the many published methods it appears that hydrogels constitute the preferred scaffolds for myocardial tissue engineering and support of organotypic development. Here we describe a simple and highly robust protocol for the generation of engineered heart muscle using a collagen-based hydrogel method.