Engineering myocardial tissue.

To create an artificial heart is one of the most ambitious dreams of the young field of tissue engineering, a dream that, when publicly announced in 1999 (LIFE initiative around M. Sefton), provoked as much compassion as scepticism in the scientific and lay press. Today, it is fair to state that the field is still far away from having built the "bioartificial heart." Nevertheless, substantial progress has been made over the past 10 years, and a realistic perspective exists to create 3-dimensional heart muscle equivalents that may not only serve as experimental models but could also be useful for cardiac regeneration.