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

当药物/化学品被开发用于治疗某种特定疾病或供人类使用时，它们有时会产生对心脏造成损害的副作用。有时候，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/使用后才会被发现。这是对人类健康的重大风险，当一种危险产品从市场上撤出时，对制药行业来说代价高昂。虽然药物的副作用可能由许多原因引起，但一个值得关注的领域是药物对心脏肌肉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动物实验，因此这些测试往往不能很好地预测药物对人类的影响。人类心脏细胞收缩试验的发展将极大地提高对非临床发现与人类相关性的理解；一种化学物质可能会改变动物的心脏收缩能力，但不会改变人类，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，这种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 This is a significant risk tohuman health & is costly to the pharmaceutical industry when a dangerous product is withdrawn from market.Although side effects of drugs can be caused by many things, one area of great concern is the effects of drugson the force that heart muscle can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.