¹Department of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong, China

Hung-Fat Tse, MD, was born in Hong Kong and earned his medical degree from the University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong. He completed his postgraduate training on Internal Medicine and Cardiology in the Department of Medicine, Queen Mary Hospital, University of Hong Kong. He also completed his cardiac electrophysiology training fellowship in the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He awarded the Sir Patrick Manson Gold Medal for his MD Thesis. He held academic appointments at the University of Hong Kong since 1996 and is currently the Associate Professor in Medicine and Director, Sun Chieh Yeh Cardiovascular Research and Training Laboratory, The University of Hong Kong. Dr Tse has been involved in cardiovascular research for the past 10 years. His current research interests include cardiac pacing, mechanisms and nonpharmacological treatment for atrial fibrillation (including dual-site atrial pacing, implantable atrial defibrillator and transvenous cryoablation), and basic and clinical researches on stem cells therapy for treatment of heart diseases. He has published over 100 original scientific articles in international journals.

Despite the major efforts to prevent and treat cardiovascular diseases, they remain the most common cause of death in the western world and China. The main culprit is congestive heart failure, which can be caused by myocardial infarction, hypertension or any other insults to the heart. Human heart loses most of their regeneration capacity in the postnatal development, and is not able to replace any defects after damage with functional myocardium. Currently, the only available curative therapy for patients with end-stage heart failure is heart transplantation, but is limited by the severe shortage of donor organs and transplant rejection. Stem cell transplantation has been explored as potential therapy to limit the progression of heart failure. Our recent clinical studies have highlighted the potential capacity to regenerate new blood vessels for the heart by intramyocardial injection of bone marrow stem cells. However, due to the limited developmental plasticity of these adult bone marrow stem cells, this approach may not be sufficient to replace cardiomyocyte (CM) loss due to heart attack. Direct CM replacement therapy is an obvious and promising option but is also limited by the availability of transplantable human CMs. Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), isolated from the inner cell mass of human blastocysts, can propagate indefinitely in culture while maintaining their pluripotency, including the ability to differentiate into CMs; therefore, hESCs may provide an unlimited ex vivo source of CMs for transplantation and other cell-based therapies. In combination with recent advances in biomedical engineering techniques, hESCs have therefore enabled researchers to pursue the revolutionary paradigm of regenerative medicine for repairing, replacing or enhancing organ function in such aging-related diseases as heart failure.