Novoheart Holdings Inc.; September 09, 2019.
Novoheart seeks to revolutionize human heart tissue engineering for disease modeling and drug discovery.
Peer-reviewed publications feature results from the completion of two research contracts between Novoheart and Pfizer.
In the second study, published in the July 2019 issue of Stem Cell Research and Therapy2, Novoheart developed the world’s first customized, 3D engineered, human cardiac tissue models of Friedreich’s ataxia (FRDA), a rare neuromuscular degenerative disease that affects over 1 in 50,000 people worldwide. FRDA patients have a defective Frataxin gene, which often leads to lethal heart complications. This new disease model, based on MyHeartTM assays, was created using genetically modified as well as FRDA patient-derived cells, capturing both electrical and mechanical defects of the heart observed in FRDA patients.
This new approach marks an important step away from using animals as traditional testing models – they have limited predictive ability for drug discovery due to dramatic differences from human physiology. Novoheart’s FRDA models, on the other hand, offer an innovative and powerful human-based platform to develop new therapies for FRDA’s cardiac symptoms, for which no effective treatments are currently available.
With sole ownership of the intellectual property rights, Novoheart is now commercializing the FRDA disease model and has subsequently confirmed commercial contracts with multiple drug developers.
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