HeartBeat.bio inks partnership with Molecular Devices

Cardiac side effects are among the most common adverse drug effects that lead to study discontinuation. A high-throughput screening method based on cardiac organoids developed by Vienna-based HeartBeat.bio GmbH now promises to identify cardiac-toxic candidates already during preclinical testing of drug candidates and can thus significantly improve the productivity of drug development.  As cardiotoxicity is one of the most common causes of drug candidate failure, the collaboration will enable researchers to reliably automate the production of cardiac organoids and improve the development of entirely new cardiac drugs.
 Under the agreement, Molecular Devices’ will contribute its automated 3D cell culture and imaging system.

"Because cardioids represent better predictive models than cardiomyocyte or spheroid models, this new platform has the potential to significantly improve preclinical drug characterization and greatly increase the efficiency of pharmaceutical drug development," said Susan Murphy, president of Molecular Devices.

HeartBeat.bio AG is a spin-off company of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA). Cardioids are a stem-cell derived, multi-cellular, 3D tissue culture system that recapitulates the human heart physiology and the most clinically relevant left ventricular chamber in an unprecedented way. HeartBeat.bio AG’s human organoid screening platform enables the automated, reproducible, and cost-effective large-scale generation and analysis of cardiac organoids, making it suitable for high-throughput compound screenings in order to detect heart failure and cardiomyopathies as well as to allow cardiotoxicity studies for new drug candidates.