Developments in bioprocessing technology play an important role for overcoming challenges in cardiac tissue engineering. To this end, our laboratory has developed a novel rotary perfused bioreactor for supporting three-dimensional cardiac tissue engineering. The dynamic culture environments provided by our novel perfused rotary bioreactor and/or the high-aspect rotating vessel produced constructs with higher viability and significantly higher cell numbers (up to 4 x 10(5) cells/bead) than static tissue culture flasks. Furthermore, cells in the perfused rotary bioreactor showed earlier gene expressions of cardiac troponin-T, alpha- and beta-myosin heavy chains with higher percentages of cardiac troponin-I-positive cells and better uniformity of sacromeric alpha-actinin expression. A dynamic and perfused environment, as provided by this bioreactor, provides a superior culture performance in cardiac differentiation for embryonic stem cells particularly for larger 3D constructs.