Biomaterials and bioactive molecules to drive differentiation in striated muscle tissue engineering

The generation of engineered tissues and organs has entered into the clinical practice in response to the chronic lack of organ donors. In particular, for the skeletal and cardiac muscles the translational potential of tissue engineering approaches has clearly been shown, even though the construction of these tissues lags behind others given the hierarchical, highly organized architecture of striated muscles. Failure of the cardiac tissue leads to cardiovascular diseases, which are the leading cause of death in the developed world (Di Felice et al., 2014). On the other hand, there are many clinical cases where the loss of skeletal muscle due to a traumatic injury, an aggressive tumor, or prolonged denervation may be cured by the regeneration of the muscle tissue (Perniconi and Coletti, 2014). Inthisvolume,wehaveincludedarticlesfromrenowned researchers in the fields of skeletal and cardiac muscle engineer- ing who have contributed with methods, original research, and review articles covering various aspects of native and synthetic biomaterials or three-dimensional (3D) structures able to induce stem cell differentiation and which may be used in pre-clinical and clinical studies