Advanced non-animal models in biomedical research : cardiovascular diseases : executive summary

This report presents an overview of available and emerging non-animal models in the field of cardiovascular disease (CVD) research. Over 14,000 abstracts published between 2013 and 2019 were scanned for relevant non-animal methods for CVD. From these, 449 publications were identified as candidate methods according to selected inclusion/exclusion criteria. In vitro cell and tissue cultures, human ex vivo and in silico approaches were considered and collated into a catalogue to form a key knowledge source for researchers, educators and national ethics and funding authorities. The study confirmed that cell-based models represent fine-tuned approaches, however most of the time they intrinsically lack in three-dimensional structure, except for the growing, yet specific field of cardiovascular tissue engineered constructs. The ex vivo methods are used to overcome the dimensionality limitation, while maintaining the required experimental accuracy. Nevertheless, most of the analysed ex vivo models use animal or human explanted organs, with the difficulty in maintaining their integrity for a long time. Beyond the purely hemodynamic applications offered by computational fluid-dynamics approaches, the computational methods are used to reproduce complex systems, including tissue/organ electrophysiology and tissue remodelling, potentially enabling personalised medicine approaches. In the future, such methods could replace many animal-based experiments in elucidating disease mechanisms and aiding in therapies development.