During an average individual's lifespan, the human heart pumps nearly 200 million liters of blood delivered by approximately 3 billion heartbeats. Therefore, it is not surprising that native myocardium under this incredible demand is extraordinarily complex, both structurally and functionally. As a result, successful engineering of adult-mimetic functional cardiac tissues is likely to require utilization of highly specialized biomaterials representative of the native extracellular microenvironment. There is currently no single biomaterial that fully recapitulates the architecture or the biochemical and biomechanical properties of adult myocardium. However, significant effort has gone toward designing highly functional materials and tissue constructs that may one day provide a ready source of cardiac tissue grafts to address the overwhelming burden of cardiomyopathic disease. In the near term, biomaterial-based scaffolds are helping to generate in vitro systems for querying the mechanisms underlying human heart homeostasis and disease and discovering new, patient-specific therapeutics. When combined with advances in minimally-invasive cardiac delivery, ongoing efforts will likely lead to scalable cell and biomaterial technologies for use in clinical practice. In this review, we describe recent progress in the field of cardiac tissue engineering with particular emphasis on use of biomaterials for therapeutic tissue design and delivery.

在一个人的平均生命周期中，人类心脏泵出近 2 亿升血液，由大约 30 亿次心跳输送。因此，在这种令人难以置信的需求下，原生心肌在结构和功能上都异常复杂也就不足为奇了。因此，成人模拟功能心脏组织的成功工程可能需要利用代表天然细胞外微环境的高度专业化的生物材料。目前没有单一的生物材料可以完全概括成人心肌的结构或生化和生物力学特性。然而，在设计高功能材料和组织结构方面付出了巨大的努力，这些材料和组织结构有朝一日可能会提供现成的心脏组织移植物来源，以解决心肌病的巨大负担。在短期内，基于生物材料的支架有助于产生体外系统，用于查询人类心脏稳态和疾病的潜在机制，并发现新的、针对患者的治疗方法。当与微创心脏递送的进步相结合时，正在进行的努力可能会导致可扩展的细胞和生物材料技术用于临床实践。在这篇综述中，我们描述了心脏组织工程领域的最新进展，特别强调使用生物材料进行治疗性组织设计和递送。