SmartHeart 

A novel 3D in vitro assay for improved assessment of cardiac drug efficacy and toxicity

About the project:

The SmartHeart project is dedicated to the development of a in vitro cardiac assay to assess physiological relevant read-outs all in a single platform.

According to WHO, every year there is an average of 18 million people dying out of cardiac diseases. A substantial part of these diseases is due to cardiomyopathies that affect many young people. Despite all the advances made in medicine in the last decades, there is still a long way to go before having robust disease models and efficient development of new therapies. Nowadays, cardiac tissue engineering is becoming one of the most common ways to mimic the main events encountered in these types of pathologies, but there are still a lot of limitations in the existing models, as lack of scalability for high throughput and high content screening platforms, or simply because the read outs provided are not enough or not relevant.

To answer to these questions, the goal of this project is to develop a novel proprietary 3D cardiac assay, which enables both the formation and maturation of cardiac organoids based on cardiomyocytes derived from hiPSC as well as the acquisition of the most relevant readouts to screen drugs and to assess toxicological effects, all in single platform. The assay will be developed in a 96 well format, commonly used in drug screening platforms and will enable the acquisition of the following read-outs:

– beating rate,
– beating amplitude,
– contractility force assessment,
– calcium exchange,
– imaging of tissue/organoid organization,
– intra-cellular imaging.

Beating Cardiac Organoid: 

Circular 3D morphology moves towards a better model for heart physiology

Readouts: contractility force, beating rate, beating amplitude, ionic exchange, cell morphology, cell organization, etc.

Standard system description: 500 µm ring shaped multicellular cardiac organoid.

Fast maturation stage: after 1 day of culture the cardiac organoid starts to beat spontaneously.

High stability: the organoid is stable for more than 1 month.

Format: the product is available in 24 and 96 well plate formats

Applications: toxicology, drug discovery, disease modeling, etc.

About the product: 

First version available for commercialization: 24 well plate format SmartContractility Plates 

About the ER: 

Ana Rita Ribeiro received a PhD in Physics from the University of Porto, Portugal in 2017. Her work was dedicated to the development of optical fiber based tools for cell trapping and manipulation. Shortly after receiving her PhD degree she moved to France where she started working on microfabricated based devices for cell microenvironment control. The SmartHeart project awarded in the framework of MSCA allowed her to develop a novel cardiac assay in collaboration with the team of Prof. Hulot (PARCC) for drug screening and tox applications.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement number 898312