VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA — (Marketwired) — Mar 29, 2018 — Novoheart (“Novoheart” or the “Company”) (TSX VENTURE: NVH)(FRANKFURT: 3NH) is pleased to announce that it has filed a patent application on the use of its proprietary MyHeart™ Platform of human bioengineered heart tissues to create disease models for neurological diseases in which afflicted patients suffer and often die from cardiac dysfunction. The IP, which is solely owned by Novoheart, was developed as part of the Company’s successfully completed second contract with a Global Pharma partner.
The disease models will benefit patients and drug developers by providing a unique and robust platform for testing candidate therapeutics, ensuring that the best leads are chosen for clinical development. They also serve as an experimental model for unraveling pathological mechanisms of the diseases and for providing insights into potential drug targets.
Historically, drug development has been greatly impeded by the lack of reliable disease models outside of the human body. The scientific community has depended heavily upon genetically engineered small mice: despite their well-recognized inadequacy in recapitulating human diseases, they have been persistently used in the absence of a superior alternative. Furthermore, certain diseases are unique to humans and cannot be modeled using animals.
Novoheart’s MyHeart™ Platform, which can be personalized with patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), offers a revolutionary solution to this problem: with multicellular, 3D bioartificial heart tissues and chambers designed to reproduce clinical phenomena including arrhythmias and heart failure, disease symptoms can be readily detected and analyzed. This was successfully demonstrated with a neurological disease model created through the Global Pharma contract, whereby electrical and mechanical defects of the heart caused by a pathological gene mutation were captured by the human ventricular Cardiac Anisotropic Sheet (hvCAS), human ventricular Cardiac Tissue Strip (hvCTS) and the human ventricular Cardiac Organoid Chamber (hvCOC), otherwise known as the “human heart-in-a-jar”. The neurological disease is part of a family of related disorders, including various forms of hereditary ataxias, which similarly display cardiac complications and affect more than 1 in 20,000 people worldwide.
“This technology can immediately be applied to drug screening as well as mechanistic studies to identify potential druggable targets for treating patients suffering from these debilitating diseases,” said Novoheart CSO Dr. Kevin Costa. “With its proven capability, Novoheart will continue to create human cardiac tissue disease models for various disorders and in doing so, help bring new treatments into the pipeline for such diseases by substantially reducing the costs and increasing the success rates.”
“By enabling promising new drug candidates to be more quickly and accurately identified and advanced, our technology can bring tangible benefits to patients worldwide,” said Novoheart CEO Dr. Ronald Li. “As we continue to develop these models, we are building a novel library of heart tissues and chambers, as well as a drug response data repository for training machine learning algorithms, that can subsequently be used for developing highly targeted treatments. We believe that diseased and normal hearts, of different ethnic groups, on the MyHeart™ platform have the ability to revolutionize drug screening and development for advancing precision medicine.”
About Novoheart:
Novoheart is a global stem cell biotechnology company pioneering an array of next-generation human heart tissue prototypes. It is the first company in the world to have engineered miniature living human heart pumps that can revolutionize drug discovery, helping to save time and money for developing new therapeutics. Also known as ‘human heart-in-a-jar’, Novoheart’s bio-artificial human heart constructs are created using state-of-the-art and proprietary stem cell and bioengineering approaches and are utilized by drug developers for accurate preclinical testing as to the effectiveness and safety of new drugs, maximizing the successes in drug discovery whilst minimizing costs and harm caused to patients.
