Boehringer Ingelheim and HeartBeat.bio have entered into a collaboration to accelerate the development of new therapy options and achieve better outcomes for people with heart diseases, HeartBeat.bio announced.
The collaboration will focus on the investigation of human cardiac organoids (Cardioids) for high-throughput early safety assessment and drug discovery.
Using selected reference compounds from its research and development programmes, Boehringer Ingelheim will work with the scientists from HeartBeat.bio to further advance the company’s 3D biology screening platform.
Heart and circulatory diseases are responsible for a quarter of all deaths in the UK, totalling more than 160,000 deaths each year – an average of 460 deaths each day or one every three minutes in the UK.
Up to one third of investigational new drugs across all therapy areas fail in late-stage clinical trials due to safety concerns – in most cases due to adverse cardiovascular reactions – and existing cardiac safety screening models, such as cardiomyocytes, are limited in predictability as they are not able to adequately recapitulate human heart physiology, HeartBeat.bio outlined.
The company’s 3D biology screening platform aims to overcome these limitations by using self-organising, highly scalable Cardioids as translational models for high-throughput early safety assessment and drug discovery.
Commenting on the collaboration, Michael Krebs, chief executive officer of HeartBeat.bio, said: “We are delighted to work with Boehringer Ingelheim to validate our Cardioids for safety assessment and drug discovery. This collaboration is an important step in advancing our high-throughput Cardioid screening platform for drug development in different indications of heart failure.
“Our aim is to radically change the drug discovery paradigm and thus significantly improve the time and success rates for development of urgently needed, new therapeutic options for heart disease patients.”
HeartBeat.bio explained that its heart organoids are stem-cell derived 3D cell culture systems, which mimic the human heart physiology in a ‘totally new way’.
In collaboration with automated 3D cell culture and image analysis solutions provider, Molecular Devices, HeartBeat.bio is working to make a high-throughput screening platform based on Cardioids broadly available.
‘Once launched, this Cardioid screening platform has the potential to improve preclinical research, leading to higher clinical trial success rates, reduced costs and accelerated timelines contributing to transforming lives for people with heart diseases,’ the company said in a statement.