Platform technology for maturation of human stem cell derived cardiomyocytes and cardiotoxicity screening

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Beating heart cell cannot be sampled and expanded from human hearts, thus pharmaceutical industry is forced to usealternative methods to assess safety and efficacy of new drug candidates before they reach humans including assessmentin animal models. Animal heart cells have different functional properties than human heart cells, thus it is not possible to fullycapture both positive and negative effects of a drug during pre-clinical testing. As a result, many promising drug candidatesare abandoned early on and some dangerous drugs reach human use e.g. Vioxx that resulted in ~30,000 deaths and$5billion in settlements. This project will revolutionize the way drugs are tested before they reach humans by developing anarray of human heart tissues, starting from stem cells. We will mature the tissues so that they resemble adult human heartusing electrical field stimulation. We will engineer a fully inert platform that does not absorb or interact with the applied drugs.It will also be compatible with the equipment already in use in pharmaceutical and biological labs. Uniquely, our platform willgive readouts of many cardiac responses at once from the single tissue in a non-destructive manner. By looking at thisintegrated response from a real mature human heart tissue, we will make drug discovery process more effective ultimatelysaving cost to Canadian pharmaceutical industry and lives of Canadians by enabling discovery of safer and more effectivedrugs.