3D Cardiac HTS
Bringing 3D cardiac tissues to high throughput screens
Heart Disease
Cardiovascular disease is the number 1 cause of death worldwide, killing more than 18 million people annually. Despite significant efforts from academia and the pharmaceutical industry, novel cardiac drugs are not reaching patients, due to a 91.8% compound failure rate during clinical development. 44% fail due to inadequate efficacy and 24% due to safety issues, indicating a lack of functionally relevant pre-clinical models used during drug discovery.
The technology
A microtiter plate on top of a microfluidic layer, which contains the chambers and flexible pillars necessary to produce miniaturized 3D cardiac strips and measure their contractile output. This is necessary to enable the use of human 3D cardiac tissues in drug discovery at a commercially viable level for use in both 1) target-based drug discovery to radically increase compound throughput while maintaining a good level of predictability and 2) phenotypic drug discovery to uncover novel drugs alongside novel pathways and novel targets
