Although past decades have witnessed significant reductions in mortality of heart failure together with advances in our understanding of its cellular, mo-lecular, and whole-heart features, a lot of basic cardiac research still fails to translate into clinical practice.In this review we examine myocardial slices, a novel modelin the translational arena. Myocardial slices are living ultra-thin sections of heart tissue. Slices maintain the myocardium’s native function (contractility, electrophysiology) and structure (multicellularity, extracellular matrix), and can be prepared from animal and human tissue. Thediscussion9beginswith the history and current advances in the model, the different in-terlaboratory methods of preparation and their potentialimpact on results. We then contextualise slices’ advantages and limitations by comparing itwith other cardiac models. Recently, sophisticated methods have enabled slices to be cultured chronically in vitro whilepreserving thefunctional and structural phenotype. This is more timely now than ever where chronic physiologically relevant in vitro platforms for assessment of therapeutic strategies are urgently needed. We interrogate the technological developments that have per-mitted this, their limitations, and future directions. Finally, we look into the general obstacles faced by the translational field, and how implementation of research systems utilising slices could help in resolving these.