Techbio company HeartBeat.bio and genomics company Cubase Bio have entered a strategic research collaboration to advance spatial profiling of human cardiac organoids for cardiovascular drug discovery.
The partners have been awarded €1M in funding for their joint project “Fibrosis Analysis in Cardioids via Transcriptomic Spatial-mapping in 3D” (FACTS-3D). Funding is provided by Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, with co-funding from the European Union through Horizon Europe.
“The FACTS-3D project brings together two highly complementary technologies to address one of the major challenges in cardiovascular drug discovery: understanding disease biology in a physiologically relevant human context while retaining the spatial information that is essential for complex cardiac phenotypes”, said HeartBeat.bio CEO Michael Krebs.
“For HeartBeat.bio, this collaboration represents an important step toward using Cardioids not only for phenotypic drug discovery, but also to uncover and validate novel mechanisms and targets for heart failure, particularly in myocardial fibrosis and cardiac remodeling.”
The project will combine HeartBeat.bio’s Cardioid technology with Cubase Bio’s 3D spatial transcriptomics platform. The aim is to develop a scalable approach for analysing the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying myocardial fibrosis.
Heart failure affects more than 64 million people worldwide, and despite advances in cardiovascular research, the development of new therapies is still lagging. Conventional preclinical tools often fail to fully capture the complexity of human biology, cellular interactions and the spatial organisation of underlying cardiac diseases.
FACTS-3D intends to address these difficulties by combining physiologically relevant human cardiac organoids with high-throughput 3D spatial transcriptomics. Using Cubase Bio’s innovative true 3D spatial technology, scalable to 96- and 384-well plate formats, this project will investigate HeartBeat.bio’s human Cardioids within their full, three-dimensional tissue context.
“Cardiac biology is a perfect example of why 3D spatial context matters so much. The way cells organise in three dimensions is central to how a heart chamber is built, what happens when fibrosis occurs and how the heart remodels itself,” said Cubase Bio CEO Malte Kühnemund.
“Our technology was built to capture exactly that kind of complexity in full three dimensions. It cannot be assessed by sectioning, and 3D imaging hardware lacks the throughput. This makes our 3D spatial transcriptomics technology a natural fit for high-throughput cardiac drug screening.”
By resolving gene expression and cellular states within intact 3D cardiac tissue, the partners aim to identify disease mechanisms, characterise treatment responses and generate insight for target discovery and drug development.
