14 Sep Cellular Dynamics, VivoMedica launch effort to validate cardiac model
Cellular Dynamics and Sittingbourne, England-based VivoMedica have launched a consortium to validate a human cell model and analysis system, based on the firms’ technologies, for preclinical cardiotoxicity testing of drug candidates. The consortium will be formally launched at the Safety Pharmacology Society 9th Annual Meeting in Strasbourg, France this week.
The firms said the consortium is being launched this week in France at the Safety Pharmacology Society 9th Annual Meeting. The firms hope to enlist pharmaceutical companies in validating the human cardiac model.
Specifically, the consortium aims to validate the testing system using Cellular Dynamics’ iCell Cardiomyocytes and VivoMedica’s DrugPrint analysis system. They said that extracellular micro-electrode array recordings from induced pluripotent stem cell-derived human cardiomyocytes will be analyzed using VivoMedica’s electrical waveform analysis technology.
“Adverse cardiac effects have resulted in the withdrawal or blackbox warnings of multiple high profile drugs in recent years. Even now it’s estimated that 25-40% of all drugs in pre-clinical testing show some adverse drug-induced cardiotoxicity,” said Julian Demmon, CEO of VivoMedica. “The challenge for the industry is how to reliably predict clinical cardiotoxicity earlier in the pipeline and thus to target drug development funding more effectively. We believe that iCell Cardiomyocytes in the DrugPrint system will help the pharmaceutical industry overcome this challenge.”
“Maintaining a normal cardiac rhythm requires the complex coordination of dozens of proteins. Disruption of this interplay, even for a few minutes, can have severe consequences and even death,” said Craig T. January, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.C., director and founder of CDI. “Incorporating human cells into toxicology testing is an important goal in the pharmaceutical industry, as human-based models are more likely to recapitulate relevant in vivo biology.”
The partners believe this approach will identify drug-induced changes that indicate the arrhythmogenic potential of drug candidates under investigation.