Published online Mar 26, 2015. doi: 10.4330/wjc.v7.i3.125
Peer-review started: October 28, 2014
First decision: December 17, 2014
Revised: January 5, 2015
Accepted: January 18, 2015
Article in press: January 19, 2015
Published online: March 26, 2015
Processing time: 137 Days and 15.5 Hours
Cell transplantation is an attractive potential therapy for heart diseases. For example, myocardial infarction (MI) is a leading cause of mortality in many countries. Numerous medical interventions have been developed to stabilize patients with MI and, although this has increased survival rates, there is currently no clinically approved method to reverse the loss of cardiac muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) that accompanies this disease. Cell transplantation has been proposed as a method to replace cardiomyocytes, but a safe and reliable source of cardiogenic cells is required. An ideal source would be the patients’ own somatic tissue cells, which could be converted into cardiogenic cells and transplanted into the site of MI. However, these are difficult to produce in large quantities and standardized protocols to produce cardiac cells would be advantageous for the research community. To achieve these research goals, small molecules represent attractive tools to control cell behavior. In this editorial, we introduce the use of small molecules in stem cell research and summarize their application to the induction of cardiogenesis in non-cardiac cells. Exciting new developments in this field are discussed, which we hope will encourage cardiac stem cell biologists to further consider employing small molecules in their culture protocols.
Core tip: There are a plethora of methods to manipulate the phenotype of somatic cells and convert them into different cell types, such as cardiac cells. The use of small molecules provides numerous advantages, such as ease of use, tight temporal control and reversible effects on target proteins. Significantly, the production of small molecules is cheap and synthesis can be readily standardized. This would allow non-specialist stem cell laboratories to readily adopt small molecule-based methods to produce functional cardiac cells from multiple cell sources, including therapeutic applications requiring the somatic cells of patients with cardiovascular disease.