Chronic heart failure (CHF) is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality all over the world. Although conventional pharmacological intervention has significantly improved the prognosis of patients with CHF, the mortality rate has nevertheless remained high over the last five years.
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2 Hence the fields of development of novel therapeutic strategies against CHF remain of utter importance. In the past decades, a novel and potentially beneficial approach has emerged: stem cell therapy. Although stem cell-based therapy provides a promising approach to salvage the damaged heart in most animal experiments, transplantation of autologous bone marrow stem cells (BMSCs) for cardiogenesis or neovasculogenesis has yielded inconsistent outcomes in clinical trials.
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6 However, compelling new findings on stem cell niches in the heart, homing signals and telomere dysfunction of endogenous stem/progenitor cells
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9 have convinced us to sustain research into strategies for regenerative therapy in CHF. …
