TECHNOLOGY
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Novoheart began with a passion for stem cell research and its impact on human health . “ When you ’ re sitting in the laboratory , making exciting discoveries , what you really want to be able to do is have that impact on society – to impact patients , impact the world in some way ,” says Professor Kevin Costa , Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Novoheart .
The biotechnology startup believes it can do exactly that , as the first company in the world to have created miniature beating human hearts aimed at revolutionising drug discovery and the development of heart therapeutics .
Currently , a key issue in treating cardiac conditions is the difficulty of getting new drug candidates tested and approved using existing technology and parameters . Typically , the development of a new drug candidate costs $ 2-4bn and takes more than a decade , with failure rates for new drugs of circa 90 %. The primary cause for the withdrawal of any potentially lifesaving new drugs is heart toxicity . The conventional non-human , non-cardiac cell and animal models used to test potential drugs is poorly predictive of human responses , leading to false negative and false positive pre-clinical results which compromise overall successes .
These limitations , coupled with a shortage of available human hearts to test on , make it difficult for new drugs designed to treat heart conditions
OCTOBER 2018