TARA Biosystems, Inc launched Cardiotype.Ca, its in vitro system for assessing cardiac calcium signalling. The new assay can be used independently or in combination with TARA’s contractility assay to evaluate the safety and efficacy of biopharmaceutical drug candidates.
Calcium is critical to cardiac function because it helps convert electrical signals in heart muscle to mechanical contractions needed for the heart to pump blood. To assess cardiac function properly, it is important to measure contractility and calcium signaling at the same time. However, there have been no models to measure both these functions simultaneously in the lab until now, making it challenging to test the cardiac effects of drug candidates.
Leveraging TARA’s Biowire II platform, Cardiotype.Ca is the only in vitro assay on the market that is capable of simultaneously measuring calcium signaling and contractility in 3D engineered human cardiac tissues. Unlike current in vitro and animal models, TARA’s platform uses induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) derived from cardiac tissue and possesses the structural, functional, and genetic characteristics of adult human cardiac muscle. The physiologically relevant model enables early cardiac risk assessment of drug discovery candidates and accelerates discovery of novel heart medicines via disease modeling and phenotypic screening capabilities. Cardiotype.Ca has already received successful evaluations from several pharmaceutical partners prior to the launch.
“The ability to measure calcium signalling and contractility simultaneously in TARA’s engineered tissue model allows our pharma partners to uncover mechanistic insights about their drug candidates in human-relevant models much earlier in the drug development process, helping to deliver better drugs sooner,” said Michael Graziano, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of TARA Biosystems.
