About
3DCardiacHTS
The use of available 3D cardiac strip systems, in finding new compounds for drug discovery, has been prevented by its requirement for large cell numbers and by the assay being performed on platforms not compatible with current drug discovery robotics, resulting in very low compound screening throughput. The ground-breaking technology 3DCardiacHTS, combines three highly innovative technologies: 1) human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived heart cells (enabling disease models and personalized medicine, 2) 3D bioengineering (nanolitre mold production) and 3) microfluidic systems (small cell numbers), to enable the production of large numbers of 3D cardiac strips with only 2.000 cells.
The Technology
The 3DCardiacHTS technology uses 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. The microtiter plate format makes the system compatible with multipipette robots used in high throughput screening (HTS). Prof. Albert van der Berg’s research, e.g. project Twente Organ-on-Chip Platform (OPEN-TOP), enables the production of our 3D cardiac strips in an automated and standardized manner. Implementing OPEN-TOP into the fluidic microtiter plate will allow the daily production of sufficient 3D cardiac strips to test 10,000 compounds, a significant competitive advantage compared to the current manual pipetting systems.
River BioMedics
River BioMedics has an enthousiastic team working on cardiac drug discovery utilizing its in-house developed 3D cardiac models for target validation and compound screening in the hit-to-lead stage. The inclusion of these human-predictive assays into the drug discovery pipeline provides a unique opportunity to select, already early in the drug discovery process, those compounds that have a high chance of showing human efficacy in clinical trials. Thereby River BioMedics aims to increase the success rate of cardiac drug discovery and bring novel drugs to patients more efficiently.
