Small molecules and human cardiomyogenesis: Is there a bottleneck in current research?

Human pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-derived CMs) have a vast potential in drug discovery, disease modeling and regenerative medicine. In recent years various differentiation protocols for hPSC-derived CMs have been developed. Most of them utilize the modulation of human cardiomyogenesis via small-molecule compounds. However, setbacks to the large-scale application of hPSC-derived CMs still abound: insufficient insight into important signaling pathways for cardiac lineage-specific differentiation and identification of suitable small-molecule modulators; inconsistent results due to unstandardised culturing techniques; lack of effective maturation of hPSC-derived CMs in vitro. So is there a bottleneck in current research? This paper attempts to answer this question