MINI REVIEW article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Organoids and Organ-On-A-Chip
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancing Disease Modeling and Therapy with Organoids and Organ-on-a-ChipView all 4 articles
Mini-hearts for disease modeling and drug testing – process optimization versus biological functionality
Provisionally accepted
- 1Applied Stem Cell Technologies, Department of BioEngineering Technologies, TechMed Centre, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
- 2Department of Anatomy and Embryology, Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum, Leiden, Netherlands
- 3BIOS Lab-on-a-Chip Group, Max Planck Institute for Complex Fluid Dynamics, Universiteit Twente MESA+, Enschede, Netherlands
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Traditional two-dimensional cell cultures and in vivo animal studies fail to fully recapitulate human cardiac physiology, highlighting the urgent need for more relevant human-based models. Engineered three-dimensional cardiac systems - including organoids, engineered heart tissues, and heart-on-chip platforms offer promising alternatives, providing structural and functional insights into cardiac biology. However, a critical limitation of these models is their inability to perform fluid pumping and relaxation, which together define fundamental heart function. Engineered cardiac chambers have emerged to address this gap, enabling physiologically relevant pressure-volume measurements and capturing both contractile and diastolic dynamics that mimic aspects of native cardiac hemodynamics. This mini-review examines the current state of engineered cardiac chambers and highlights their main design features. We discuss their applications in disease modeling and drug testing, and outline key factors influencing the optimization of these models, including balancing biological fidelity with process efficiency through modular design principles. Overall, engineered cardiac chambers represent a unique, powerful platform to improve mechanistic understanding of cardiac disease, offering significant potential to advance cardiovascular research and therapeutic development.
Keywords: Tissue Engineering, 3D cardiac models, engineered cardiac chambers, Drug testing, Disease modeling.
Received: 06 Oct 2025; Accepted: 12 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hecking, Cano-Jorge, Passier and Rivera-Arbelaez. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: José Manuel Rivera-Arbelaez
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