Despite therapeutic advances, heart failure remains a common and serious event 
characterized by initial and progressive loss of cardiac myocytes, a loss that 
is currently untreatable. Cell therapy has emerged as a promising new approach 
to the treatment of heart failure, with very encouraging experimental results. 
Since 2000, when human stem cell therapy was first attempted in France, clinical 
trials with adult stem cells (myoblasts, bone-marrow derived cells, mesenchymal 
stem cells) have given variable results. The inconsistent and modest therapeutic 
benefit observed in these studies is due more to paracrine effects than to the 
hoped-for cell replacement, as adult stem cells do not turn into cardiomyocytes 
and their survival rate after transplantation is very low. In order to be 
effective, cell therapy should use heart muscle cells derived from pluri- or 
multipotent cells (human embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, 
resident cardiac cells), which are likely to have a higher survival rate in a 
hostile biological environment and deteriorated tissue scaffold. Cardiac tissue 
engineering assisted by nanotechnologies may eventually help to meet this 
challenge.