A major obstacle for efficient drug discovery and development is the absence of physiologically relevant and predictive cell-based assays. Ncardia’s integrated drug discovery platform was developed with the aim to improve the drug discovery and development process by providing disease relevant human iPSC-derived models, industry-leading scalability, and predictive, phenotypic assays to enable and conduct HTS and other early discovery efforts.
Human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes recapitulate physiological features of mature cardiomyocytes, allow screening in a patient genetic background, and can be produced in the large quantities required for high throughput screening platforms. In the current study we have developed an innovative high throughput drug efficacy screening application in a model of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), utilizing iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes.
The phenotypic assay described was robust and reproducible, allowing 42 384-well microplates to be handled per validation and execution of any phenotypic screening campaign using specialized iPSC-derivatives. Most importantly, these results hold great promise for the development of safer and more effective drugs for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy patients, and facilitate Ncardia’s mission to help its clients get better therapies to patients faster.