EMAPS-Cardio is a response to the demand for more accurate in vitro models. Our vision is to increase the efficiency of drug development and safety screening. EMAPS-Cardio aims to develop models that can predict the success of a drug at a very early stage of drug development – prior to animal testing and clinical trials. This can significantly reduce the overall need for animal testing, failed clinical trials and drug withdrawals, and increase the rate of drug development and new drugs that are brought to market. Devices based on EMAPS can be used to generate organotypic in vitro models that require advanced stimulation, i.e. mechanical, electrical and biochemical, to achieve adult cell maturity. EMAPS-Cardio strives to develop a versatile platform that can be used to grow a variety of tissues, e.g. heart, lung, skin, muscle, etc.
As a first step towards this goal, the EMAPS-Cardio research focused on cardiac models to advance the current technological state-of-the-art by developing clinically relevant, accurate cardiac models for early-stage drug screening that facilitate the faster development of highly efficient cardiovascular drugs and limit the growing socioeconomic burden of cardiovascular diseases. The main objective was to provide in vitro cardiac models that are sufficiently accurate to detect drug potency in both healthy and diseased tissues.
More specifically, EMAPS-Cardio aimed to:
- Develop two devices that can be used for growing any healthy or diseased tissues that require electrical and mechanical stimulation, e.g. heart, lung, skin, muscle, bladder, etc. and validating them for cardiac models
- Deliver accurate healthy and diseased cardiac models that can be further used for understanding the disease progression, testing the impacts of various stimuli (nutrients, nanomaterials, mechanical stress, etc.) on onset and development of the cardiac diseases, testing the efficacy of the drugs, and their cardiotoxicity
- Develop microenvironment that provides all needed stimuli during the differentiation of hiPSC and maturation of tissues, i.e. electroactive, mechanoactive, bioactive scaffolds
- Develop hiPSC differentiation protocols optimized to produce matured myocardium
- Develop sensors for simultaneous and continuous sensing of cardiac health markers (contractility strength and frequency characterization)
- Develop advanced algorithms for detection of the drug efficacy on diseased in vitro myocardium to minimize false-negatives
- Commercialize mechanoactive scaffolds for 3D cell culture, trans-well inserts for heart-on-chip, miniaturized bioreactor for electromechanoactive cell cultures, and improved maturation quality hiPSC-CMs
