Ischemic heart diseases including myocardial infarction (MI), which entails the irreversible loss of function heart muscle tissue, constitute a major socio-economic burden in global healthcare. The costs related to sickness, morbidity and the productivity losses resulting from ischemic heart diseases alone amounts to about €45 billion/year in the EU (
http://www.who.int/cardiovascular_diseases/en/(si apre in una nuova finestra)).
Consequently, the overall objective of the project is developing innovative tools and technologies enabling a curative, cell-based therapy for damaged hearts. Achieving this goal will have a considerable socio-economic impact on Europe’s healthcare system and on patients’ personal well-being.
Through its interdisciplinary excellence, TECHNOBEAT’s consortium of leading European stem cell researchers, clinicians, tissue-, bioprocess-, and technical- engineers in industry and academia is ideally positioned to address this ambitious objective(s).
Currently, heart transplantation is the only treatment option for end-stage heart failure patients; this option is strongly restricted by the availability of donor organs and the requirement of life-long medication with immunosuppressing drugs. In contrast, TECHNOBEAT aims at establishing advanced cell therapies aimed at the functional reconstitution of damaged hearts thereby preventing heart failure and the need for organ replacement.
Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) can be derived by a recent technology known as “reprogramming” from patients’ own somatic cells. hiPSCs have outstanding features with respect to their utility for advanced cell therapies that is an unlimited expandability and differentiation potential into all relevant cell types in a dish, including functional human cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells), endothelial cells (lining the blood vessels), and connective tissue-forming cells. These features make hiPSC highly attractive as a universal cell source for organ repair. However, technologies for the robust production of hiPSC-derived progenies in line with GMP standards and at reasonable cost are currently lacking.
In the total 4 years of project funding TECHNOBEAT has made ground breaking progress in establishing technologies for the production of human heart muscle cells and their preclinical testing. Particularly, the concept of generating mass-produced, bioreactor-derived µ-tissues which can be directly applied for transplantation into the heart has been proven very successful. These team-driven efforts have paved the way for leaping forward towards novel therapies for heart repair.
