**4. Conclusions**

Biomaterials are being actively investigated for their use in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine due to their biodegradability and biocompatibility properties. Another important property of biomaterials is their ability to incorporate various growth factors and cytokines and to spatially and temporally control their release. Thus, biomaterials can serve as a good platform for the controlled and sustained delivery of growth factors and cytokines to ameliorate inflammation, improve angiogenesis, reduce fibrosis, and generate functional cardiac tissue. Moreover, biomaterials can be used to address some of the challenges associated with stem cell therapy of cardiovascular diseases. Specifically, they can improve stem cell survival and retention, enhance the delivery of the factors produced by the cells, support di fferentiation, and boost their therapeutic e fficacy overall. However, despite the promising results of biomaterials in MI treatment, additional studies should be performed to improve their biocompatibility and biodegradability. Furthermore, the best source of transplanted stem cells and optimal doses of various growth factors and cytokines should be determined in order to create functional cardiac tissue and improve heart function. However, small animals do not fully recapitulate all the aspects of disease phenotypes, although they do replicate some of features. Therefore, translational aspects should be carefully interpreted with respect to these issues.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization and writing-review and editing, A.S. (Arman Saparov); writing-original draft preparation, S.S., Y.K., A.S. (Aiganym Smagulova), K.R. and A.N. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was funded by a gran<sup>t</sup> from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Kazakhstan (AP05135207).

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
