Cardiac pathologies are the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. However, the number of cardiovascular drugs entering clinical trials has decline in the past decades. Among other reasons, the poor translation of safety and efficacy from preclinical models to humans has caused for a huge increase in the overall costs of cardiac drug discovery and development. There is a clear need to find better and more efficacious treatments, but to do so, the industry needs to make the process more affordable and de-risk potential clinical candidates at early stages to optimize the use of resources.
The discovery of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in 2007 has brought a new opportunity with a high potential to revolutionize drug discovery. iPSCs are obtained from human somatic cells, have unlimited proliferation capacity, and can differentiate into any cell type of the body, including cardiac muscle cells. Since 2010, multiple cardiac diseases have been successfully modeled using this technology and it has been demonstrated that human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes can increase confidence of potential clinical candidates at early stages of drug discovery.
Download the white paper to learn:
-
How iPSC technology can help finding safer and more efficacious treatments.
-
The benefits of phenotypic screening with human iPSC-based cardiac models.
-
The latest advancements in iPSC-based solutions that contributed to find new targets and lead compounds for cardiac diseases.