Human cardiomyocytes (CMs) cease to proliferate and remain terminally differentiated thereafter, when humans reach the mid-20s. Thus, any damages sustained by myocardium tissue are irreversible, and they require medical interventions to regain functionality. To date, new
surgical procedures and drugs have been developed, albeit with limited success, to treat various
heart diseases including
myocardial infarction. Hence, there is a pressing need to develop more effective treatment methods to address the increasing mortality rate of the
heart diseases. Functional CMs are not only an important in vitro cellular tool to model various types of
heart diseases for drug development, but they are also a promising therapeutic agent for
cell therapy. However, the limited proliferative capacity entails difficulties in acquiring functional CMs in the scale that is required for pathological studies and
cell therapy development. Stem cells, human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) in particular, have been considered as an unlimited cellular source for providing functional CMs for various applications. Notable progress has already been made: the first clinical trials of hPSCs derived CMs (hPSC-CMs) for treating
myocardial infarction was approved in 2015, and their potential use in disease modeling and drug discovery is being fully explored. This concise review gives an account of current development of differentiation, purification and maturation techniques for hPSC-CMs, and their application in
cell therapy development and pharmaceutical industries will be discussed with the latest experimental evidence.