Cardiovascular diseases are the major cause of death worldwide. The heart has limited capacity of regeneration, therefore, transplantation is the only solution in some cases despite presenting many disadvantages. Tissue engineering has been considered the ideal strategy for regenerative medicine in cardiology. It is an interdisciplinary field combining many techniques that aim to maintain, regenerate or replace a tissue or organ. The main approach of cardiac tissue engineering is to create cardiac grafts, either whole heart substitutes or tissues that can be efficiently implanted in the organism, regenerating the tissue and giving rise to a fully functional heart, without causing side effects, such as immunogenicity. In this review, we systematically present and compare the techniques that have drawn the most attention in this field and that generally have focused on four important issues: the scaffold material selection, the scaffold material production, cellular selection and in vitro cell culture. Many studies used several techniques that are herein presented, including biopolymers, decellularization and bioreactors, and made significant advances, either seeking a graft or an entire bioartificial heart. However, much work remains to better understand and improve existing techniques, to develop robust, efficient and efficacious methods.

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Diseases of the cardiovascular system are the leading cause of mortality in the world, responsible for an average of 17.9 million deaths per year. 1 The most expressive are the ischemic heart diseases which occur due to the obstruction of blood vessels. In this scenario, some of the main alternatives to restore blood flow are autologous grafts, balloon catheters, and metal stents. However, these treatments can cause several problems in the long run, such as inflammation, thrombosis, and neointimal hyperplasia. 2 Tubular scaffolds based on tissue engineering (TE) techniques have been considered to address these problems and must mimic the structure of blood vessels with proteins of the natural tissue. The scaffolds must also be compatible with endothelial cells for tissue repair. Polymeric biomaterials are often applied for vascular and other soft TE scaffolds, due to the similarity of their properties to those of the natural tissues. 3,4 Proteins, as collagen (Col) and elastin (El), are natural polymers with "green" or environmentally safe properties. These proteins have great appeal to be used as scaffolds considering their biocompatibility, related to the interaction with cell surface receptors, 5 and natural degradation by proteases producing amino acids that are non-toxic and can be easily absorbed by the body. 6 In particular, Col provides structural support and resistance to the extracellular matrix (ECM). 7 It consists of a fibrous protein largely used as a biomaterial, because of its endogeny and interaction

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