Emerging Technologies in Cardiovascular Disease Modeling: Bridging Basic Science and Clinical Translation

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) remain the leading cause of death worldwide, yet therapeutic development is limited by experimental models that incompletely recapitulate human physiology, disease heterogeneity, and treatment responses. Emerging human-relevant models, including patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells, cardiac organoids, engineered tissues, organ-on-chip systems, genome editing, multi-omics, and computational approaches, are improving the ability to investigate cardiovascular disease mechanisms and therapeutic responses. In this review, we critically compare these technologies with respect to physiological relevance, reproducibility, scalability, throughput, and translational potential. We highlight their applications in disease modeling, drug discovery, toxicity assessment, and precision medicine while examining persistent limitations, including cellular immaturity, incomplete vascularization and systemic integration, model variability, and limited clinical validation. We further discuss how integration of bioengineering, genome editing, multi-omics, and computational methods may improve predictive performance. Standardization, interlaboratory validation, regulatory qualification, and prospective benchmarking against human clinical outcomes will be essential for translating these platforms into reliable tools for cardiovascular research and therapeutic development. Collectively, the convergence of stem cell biology, bioengineering, genome editing, multi-omics, and computational approaches is establishing a new generation of human-centered cardiovascular models with the potential to strengthen mechanistic discovery and accelerate the development of more predictive and personalized therapies.