title: Stem Cell Banking and Its Impact on Cardiac Regenerative Medicine.
abstract: Cardiovascular diseases, including heart failure, are the most frequent cause of death annually, even higher than any other pathologies. Specifically, patients who suffer from myocardial infarction may encounter adverse remodeling processes of the heart that can ultimately lead to heart failure. Prognosis of patients affected by heart failure is very poor with 5-year mortality close to 50 %. Despite the impressive progress in the clinical treatment of heart failure in recent years, heart transplantation is still required to avoid death as the result of the inexorable decline in cardiac function. Unfortunately, the availability of donor human hearts for transplantation largely fails to cover the number of potential recipient requests. From this urgent unmet clinical need the interest in stem cell applications for heart regeneration made its start, and has rapidly grown in the last decades. Indeed, the discovery and application of stem and progenitor cells as therapeutic agents has raised substantial interest with the objective of reversing these processes, and ultimately inducing cardiac regeneration. In this scenario, the role of biobanking may play a remarkable role to provide cells at the right time according to the patient's clinical needs, mostly for autologous use in the acute setting of myocardial infarction, largely reducing the time needed for cell preparation and expansion before administration.
authors.affiliation: Swiss Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Cardiocentro Ticino Foundation, Via Tesserete 48, 6900, Lugano, Switzerland. Silvana.Bardelli@cardiocentro.org.
authors.forename: Silvana
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bardelli
authors.affiliation: Cardiology Department, Cardiocentro Ticino Foundation, Via Tesserete 48, 6900, Lugano, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Moccetti
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D018070:Biological Specimen Banks / Q000600:supply & distribution; D015925:Cryopreservation / Q000379:methods*; D003451:Cryoprotective Agents / Q000494:pharmacology; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D053595:Embryonic Stem Cells / Q000166:cytology* / Q000187:drug effects / Q000502:physiology; D006333:Heart Failure / Q000473:pathology / Q000628:therapy*; D006351:Heart Valves / Q000187:drug effects / Q000637:transplantation; D006801:Humans; D008254:Macaca nemestrina; D009203:Myocardial Infarction / Q000473:pathology / Q000628:therapy*; D009206:Myocardium / Q000473:pathology; D032383:Myocytes, Cardiac / Q000166:cytology* / Q000187:drug effects / Q000502:physiology / Q000637:transplantation; D012038:Regeneration / Q000502:physiology; D044968:Regenerative Medicine / Q000379:methods; D033581:Stem Cell Transplantation; D014182:Transplantation, Autologous
chemical_list: D003451:Cryoprotective Agents
keywords: Acute setting; Biobanking; Cardiac progenitor cells; Cardiovascular diseases; Cell storage; Regenerative medicine