Cardiac Protective Engineering

Cardioprotective engineering is an emerging bioengineering discipline aiming to develop engineering strategies to optimize cardioprotective actions against cardiac injuries and disorders. Although there exist innate cardioprotective mechanisms capable of supporting cardiomyocyte survival in response to an insult, not all these mechanisms are optimized in promptness and effectiveness, suggesting the necessity of cardioprotective engineering. Various cardioprotective strategies have been developed and used in experimental and clinical investigations; however, few of these strategies have exerted a significant clinical impact. There are two major challenges in cardioprotective engineering—understanding the innate cardioprotective mechanisms and developing engineering strategies for precise control of the types, levels, timing, and coordination of cardioprotective actions to facilitate recovery from injuries and disorders. Understanding the innate mechanisms is the foundation for developing cardioprotective engineering strategies. Here, ischemic myocardial injury is used as an example to demonstrate the concept of cardioprotective engineering.