3D-culture system for heart regeneration and cardiac medicine.

3D cultures have gained attention in the field of regenerative medicine for their usefulness as in vitro model of solid tissues. Bottom-up technology to generate artificial tissues or organs is prospective and an attractive approach that will expand as the field of regenerative medicine becomes more translational. We have characterized c-kit positive cardiac stem cells after long-term cultures and established a 3D-nanoculture system using collagen scaffolds. By combining informatics-based studies, including proteomic analyses and microarrays, we sought to generate methods that modeled cardiac regeneration which can ultimately be used to build artificial hearts. Here, we describe the use of biodegradable beads or 3D cultures to study cardiac regeneration. We summarize recent work that demonstrates that, by using a combination of molecular analyses with 3D cultures, it is possible to evaluate concise mechanisms of solid tissue stem cell biology.