€4.5 million for HeartBeat.bio: Innovating heart disease drug discovery with animal-free testing

By Team IO

Vienna-based HeartBeat.bio, a biotech company working on a scalable platform for heart disease drug discovery, raises €4.5 million. The funding allows for the development of a high-capacity Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform for finding drugs to treat several heart diseases.

While cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, the development of effective therapeutic options is still limited due to high failure rate in clinical drug development and the lack of representative models that can adequately predict the physiology of the human heart. HeartBeat.bio’s Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform facilitates the transition from traditional pre-clinical development to an animal-free, human-centric drug discovery approach.

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HeartBeat.bio is building the worldwide first high-throughput human organoid cultivation, screening and AI-supported data analysis solution for developing first-in-class drugs to treat heart failure; faster, less expensively and with a higher probability of success in clinical trials. The so-called Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform relies on self-assembling, highly reproducible cardiac organoids which recapitulate the human physiology and enable modeling of heart diseases in a way not achieved with other in-vitro systems.

Currently, HeartBeat.bio is focused on drug-induced and different sub-types of genetic cardiomyopathies, followed by programs in diabetic cardiomyopathy, myocardial infarction, and cardiac remodeling. HeartBeat.bio was founded in 2021 based on technology from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) and is located at the Vienna BioCenter in Austria.