Fig. 4

Emerging therapeutic strategies to treat failing hearts. Gene therapy via various vectors enables direct manipulation of gene expression. Cell therapy is aimed at replacing the lost functional cardiomyocytes either exogenously or endogenously. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy is also proposed to ameliorate cardiac fibrosis and improve cardiac function. Xenotransplantation technique makes pig-to-human heart transplantation possible by overcoming multiple cross-species barriers. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated 9 (Cas9) based gene editing has the potential for curing inherited cardiomyopathy in the future. CDK: cyclin-dependent kinase; GTM(H): Gata4, Mef2c, and Tbx5 (Hand2); iPSC: induced pluripotent stem cell; hESC: human embryonic stem cell; CAR T-cell: Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell; sgRNA: small guide RNA; VEGF: vascular endothelial growth factor; FGF4: fibroblast growth factor 4; ASO: antisense oligonucleotide; SERCA: sarco/endoplasmic reticulum Ca2+−ATPase