• The company’s bio-artificial human heart chambers and tissues are utilized by international pharmaceutical companies for proper preclinical testing of safety and effectiveness of new drugs.
  • This new approach is a vital step away from utilizing animals as conventional testing models.
Heart chambers and tissues grown in lab by Novoheart, an international bio tech company, showcase advanced capabilities for disease modeling as well as drug screening which would result in safer drugs with greater efficacy. The company’s bio-artificial human heart chambers and tissues are utilized by international pharmaceutical companies for proper preclinical testing of safety and effectiveness of new drugs, with an aim to maximize success in drug discovery with minimizing harm and cost caused to patients. Outcomes from two research agreements between Rare Disease Research Unit and Pfizer’s Global Safety Pharmacology Unit show that utilizing patients having a rare inherited disease or healthy individuals, MyHeartTM Platform designed by Novoheart can achieve crucial outcomes required to improve development pipeline and drug discovery. The first trial with Global Safety Pharmacology Unit of Pfizer evaluated that robust predictive abilities demonstrated by MyHeartTM Platform from cardiac organoid chambers (hvCOC) and human ventricular cardiac tissue strips (hvCTS) of Novoheart were proven by a blinded study that utilized cardiac cells taken from healthy donors. MyHeartTM Platform accurately classified around 90% Pfizer provided drugs, before the identities were known to investigators of Novoheart. Novoheart developed the first customized, human cardiac tissue model of FRDA (Friedreich’s ataxia), 3D engineered in the world in the second study which was published recently, a neuromuscular disease which affects 1 in 50,000 people across the world. FRDA patients contain a defective Frataxin gene, which usually results in lethal heart complication. This new approach is a vital step away from utilizing animals as testing models – animals have restricted predictive ability in discovery of drug because of the differences they have from human physiology.   Source Credit: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/09/09/1912456/0/en/Two-new-Pfizer-coauthored-studies-validate-Novoheart-s-pioneering-human-bioengineered-heart-tissues-and-chambers-for-improving-drug-development.html