HeartBeat.bio AG, a biotech company building a highly scalable human organoid and AI-supported drug discovery platform for heart disease, has closed a €4.5 million pre-series A round co-led by i&i Biotech Fund, Invest AG, aws Gründungsfonds II, and Tensor Ventures. The financing enables the completion of a ready-to-use, fully integrated, automated, high-throughput Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform for proprietary and collaborative drug discovery programmes in indications with a high medical need such as drug-induced and genetic cardiomyopathies as well as myocardial infarction and fibrosis.

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. This new Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform approach starts from target identification and validation, disease modelling, hit identification and confirmation up to lead compound development, drug profiling and finally clinical trials-in-a-dish. Developed in partnership with Molecular Devices, HeartBeat.bio combines their highly scalable Cardioid technology with Molecular Devices’ CellXpress.ai Automated Cell Culture System, a 3D biology innovation hub. Along with high-content-imaging and AI-based software, the Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform is designed to develop first-in-class drugs faster, less expensively and with a higher clinical success rate.