About the project:

The SmartHeart project is dedicated to the development of a in vitro cardiac assay to assess physiological relevant read-outs all in a single platform.

According to WHO, every year there is an average of 18 million people dying out of cardiac diseases. A substantial part of these diseases is due to cardiomyopathies that affect many young people. Despite all the advances made in medicine in the last decades, there is still a long way to go before having robust disease models and efficient development of new therapies. Nowadays, cardiac tissue engineering is becoming one of the most common ways to mimic the main events encountered in these types of pathologies, but there are still a lot of limitations in the existing models, as lack of scalability for high throughput and high content screening platforms, or simply because the read outs provided are not enough or not relevant.

To answer to these questions, the goal of this project is to develop a novel proprietary 3D cardiac assay, which enables both the formation and maturation of cardiac organoids based on cardiomyocytes derived from hiPSC as well as the acquisition of the most relevant readouts to screen drugs and to assess toxicological effects, all in single platform. The assay will be developed in a 96 well format, commonly used in drug screening platforms and will enable the acquisition of the following read-outs:

– beating rate,
– beating amplitude,
– contractility force assessment,
– calcium exchange,
– imaging of tissue/organoid organization,
– intra-cellular imaging.

Beating Cardiac Organoid: 

The SmartHeart was developed in collaboration with the team of Pr. Jean Sébastien HULOT, Heart Failure Translational Research Lab, INSERM U970 | 

Paris Cardiovascular Research Center – PARCC (Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou)

Circular 3D morphology moves towards a better model for heart physiology

Readouts: contractility force, beating rate, beating amplitude, ionic exchange, cell morphology, cell organization, etc.

Standard system description: 500 µm ring shaped multicellular cardiac organoid.  

Fast maturation stage: after 1 day of culture the cardiac organoid starts to beat spontaneously.

High stability: the organoid is stable for more than 1 month.

Format: the product is available in 24 and 96 well plate formats 

Applications: toxicology, drug discovery, disease modeling, etc.

About the product: 

First version available for commercialization: 24 well plate format SmartContractility Plates 

About the ER: