Preclinical Models of Cardiac Disease: A Comprehensive Overview for Clinical Scientists

Abstract

For recent decades, cardiac diseases have been the leading cause of death and morbidity worldwide. Despite significant achievements in their management, profound understanding of disease progression is limited. The lack of biologically relevant and robust preclinical disease models that truly grasp the molecular underpinnings of cardiac disease and its pathophysiology attributes to this stagnation, as well as the insufficiency of platforms that effectively explore novel therapeutic avenues. The area of fundamental and translational cardiac research has therefore gained wide interest of scientists in the clinical field, while the landscape has rapidly evolved towards an elaborate array of research modalities, characterized by diverse and distinctive traits. As a consequence, current literature lacks an intelligible and complete overview aimed at clinical scientists that focuses on selecting the optimal platform for translational research questions. In this review, we present an elaborate overview of current in vitro, ex vivo, in vivo and in silico platforms that model cardiac health and disease, delineating their main benefits and drawbacks, innovative prospects, and foremost fields of application in the scope of clinical research incentives.

Keywords: Cardiac disease; Ex vivo; In silico; In vitro; In vivo; Preclinical modeling; Translational research.

Fig. 1

Overview of different cardiac disease models, including in vitro, ex vivo, in vivo, and in silico models. Image created in BioRender. 2D = two-dimensional, 3D = three-dimensional