VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 03/29/18 -- Novoheart ("Novoheart" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: NVH)(FRANKFURT: 3NH) is pleased to announce that it has filed a patent application on the use of its proprietary MyHeart? Platform of human bioengineered heart tissues to create disease models for neurological diseases in which afflicted patients suffer and often die from cardiac dysfunction. The IP, which is solely owned by Novoheart, was developed as part of the Company's successfully completed second contract with a Global Pharma partner.
The disease models will benefit patients and drug developers by providing a unique and robust platform for testing candidate therapeutics, ensuring that the best leads are chosen for clinical development. They also serve as an experimental model for unraveling pathological mechanisms of the diseases and for providing insights into potential drug targets.
Historically, drug development has been greatly impeded by the lack of reliable disease models outside of the human body. The scientific community has depended heavily upon genetically engineered small mice: despite their well-recognized inadequacy in recapitulating human diseases, they have been persistently used in the absence of a superior alternative. Furthermore, certain diseases are unique to humans and cannot be modeled using animals.
Novoheart's MyHeart? Platform, which can be personalized with patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), offers a revolutionary solution to this problem: with multicellular, 3D bioartificial heart tissues and chambers designed to reproduce clinical phenomena including arrhythmias and heart failure, disease symptoms can be readily detected and analyzed. This was successfully demonstrated with a neurological disease model created through the Global Pharma contract, whereby electrical and mechanical defects of the heart caused by a pathological gene mutation were captured by the human ventricular Cardiac Anisotropic Sheet (hvCAS), human ventricular Cardiac Tissue Strip (hvCTS) and the human ventricular Cardiac Organoid Chamber (hvCOC), otherwise known as the "human heart-in-a-jar". The neurological disease is part of a family of related disorders, including various forms of hereditary ataxias, which similarly display cardiac complications and affect more than 1 in 20,000 people worldwide.
"This technology can immediately be applied to drug screening as well as mechanistic studies to identify potential druggable targets for treating patients suffering from these debilitating diseases," said Novoheart CSO Dr. Kevin Costa. "With its proven capability, Novoheart will continue to create human cardiac tissue disease models for various disorders and in doing so, help bring new treatments into the pipeline for such diseases by substantially reducing the costs and increasing the success rates."
"By enabling promising new drug candidates to be more quickly and accurately identified and advanced, our technology can bring tangible benefits to patients worldwide," said Novoheart CEO Dr. Ronald Li. "As we continue to develop these models, we are building a novel library of heart tissues and chambers, as well as a drug response data repository for training machine learning algorithms, that can subsequently be used for developing highly targeted treatments. We believe that diseased and normal hearts, of different ethnic groups, on the MyHeart? platform have the ability to revolutionize drug screening and development for advancing precision medicine."
About Novoheart:
Novoheart is a global stem cell biotechnology company pioneering an array of next-generation human heart tissue prototypes. It is the first company in the world to have engineered miniature living human heart pumps that can revolutionize drug discovery, helping to save time and money for developing new therapeutics. Also known as 'human heart-in-a-jar', Novoheart's bio-artificial human heart constructs are created using state-of-the-art and proprietary stem cell and bioengineering approaches and are utilized by drug developers for accurate preclinical testing as to the effectiveness and safety of new drugs, maximizing the successes in drug discovery whilst minimizing costs and harm caused to patients.
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are statements that relate to future, not past, events. In this context, forward-looking statements often address expected future business and financial performance, and often contain words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", and "intend", statements that an action or event "may", "might", "could", "should", or "will" be taken or occur, or other similar expressions. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation; statements about the Company's future plans, its goals and expectations, and the potential applications of its MyHeart? platform are forward-looking statements. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, the risks identified in the management discussion and analysis section of Novoheart Holdings Inc.'s interim and most recent annual financial statement or other reports and filings with the TSX Venture Exchange and applicable Canadian securities regulators. Forward-looking statements are made based on management's beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date that statements are made and the respective companies undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, except as required by applicable securities laws. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements.
Contacts:
Novoheart
Ronald Li
CEO
info@novoheart.com
Virtus Advisory Group
Babak Pedram
Investor Relations
416-995-8651
bpedram@virtusadvisory.com
For media enquiries or interviews, please contact:
Josh Stanbury
Media Relations
416-628-7441
media@novoheart.com
