InoCardia: Novel human-cell based assay for assessment of cardiovascular liability

当开发药物/化学品来治疗特定疾病或用于人类使用时，它们有时会产生副作用，导致心脏损伤.偶尔，这些危险的副作用只有在药物/化学品上市并被成千上万的人服用/使用后才会消失。这对人类健康是一个重大的风险，当一种危险的产品从市场上撤出时，制药业的成本也会很高。尽管药物的副作用可以由许多因素引起，但一个非常令人关注的领域是药物对心肌在向全身泵血时产生的力量的影响。目前的药物测试依赖于使用动物，因此测试通常不能很好地预测对人类的影响。人类心脏细胞收缩性测试的发展将极大地提高对非临床发现的人类相关性的理解;化学物质可能会导致动物心脏收缩性的变化，但人类反之亦然。我们的目标是开发一种使用人类心脏细胞的测试方法，可以有效地测试高价值行业中使用的许多药物/化学品，并降低对心脏造成任何损害的风险。

When drugs/chemicals are developed to treat a particular disease or for human use purposes they sometimeshave side effects that cause damage to the heart. Occasionally these dangerous side effects are only recognisedafter the drug/chemical has been marketed & taken/used by thousands of people. This is a significant risk tohuman health & is costly to the pharmaceutical industry when a dangerous product is withdrawn from market.Although side effects of drugs can be caused by many things, one area of great concern is the effects of drugson the force that heart muscle can produce during its role in pumping blood around the body. Current drugtesting relies on the use of animals such that often the tests do not do well in predicting the effect on humans.Development of a human heart-cell contractility assay would greatly improve the under-standing of the humanrelevance of non-clinical findings; a chemical might cause a change in cardiac contract-ility in animals, but nothumans & vice versa. We aim to develop a test that uses human heart cells in a way that can efficiently testmany drugs/chemicals used in high-value industries & reduce the risk of causing any damage to the heart.