• €1M Eurostars funding supports joint development of a high-throughput 3D spatial profiling approach for myocardial fibrosis and heart failure drug discovery

HeartBeat.bio AG, a TechBio company developing a human cardiac organoid-based drug discovery platform, and Cubase Bio, a genomics company developing true 3D spatial transcriptomics technologies, today announced a strategic research collaboration to advance spatial profiling of human cardiac organoids for cardiovascular drug discovery.

The partners have been awarded ca. €1M in funding under Call 10 of the prestigious Eurostars program for their joint project, “Fibrosis Analysis in Cardioids via Transcriptomic Spatial-mapping in 3D” (FACTS-3D). National funding is provided by Vinnova (Sweden’s Innovation Agency) and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), with co-funding from the European Union through Horizon Europe. This project will combine HeartBeat.bio’s proprietary Cardioid technology with Cubase Bio’s 3D spatial transcriptomics platform to develop a scalable approach for analyzing the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying myocardial fibrosis.

Despite significant advances in cardiovascular research, the development of new therapies for heart failure remains challenging. Heart failure affects more than 64 million people worldwide and represents a major and growing global health burden. Conventional preclinical tools, such as animal models and 2D cell cultures, often fail to fully capture the complexity of human biology, cellular interactions, and the spatial organization of underlying cardiac diseases.

FACTS-3D aims to address this gap by combining physiologically relevant human cardiac organoids with high-throughput 3D spatial transcriptomics. Traditional 2D spatial transcriptomics techniques are restricted to thin tissue sections, making them fundamentally mismatched for high-throughput organoid analysis. Utilizing Cubase Bio’s innovative true 3D spatial technology, scalable to 96- and 384-well plate formats, this project will investigate HeartBeat.bio’s human Cardioids within their full, three-dimensional tissue context.

This approach is particularly relevant to myocardial fibrosis, a key driver of cardiac remodeling and a disease phenotype associated with many forms of heart failure. By resolving gene expression and cellular states within intact 3D cardiac tissue, the partners aim to identify disease mechanisms, characterize treatment responses and generate new insights for target discovery and drug development.

“The FACTS-3D project brings together two highly complementary technologies to address one of the major challenges in cardiovascular drug discovery: understanding disease biology in a physiologically relevant human context while retaining the spatial information that is essential for complex cardiac phenotypes”, said Michael Krebs, CEO of HeartBeat.bio. “For HeartBeat.bio, this collaboration represents an important step toward using Cardioids not only for phenotypic drug discovery, but also to uncover and validate novel mechanisms and targets for heart failure, particularly in myocardial fibrosis and cardiac remodeling.”

“Cardiac biology is a perfect example of why 3D spatial context matters so much. The way cells organize in three dimensions is central to how a heart chamber is built, what happens when fibrosis occurs and how the heart remodels itself. Our technology was built to capture exactly that kind of complexity in full 3 dimensions. It cannot be assessed by sectioning, and 3D imaging hardware lacks the throughput. This makes our 3D spatial transcriptomics technology a natural fit for high-throughput cardiac drug screening”, said Malte Kühnemund, CEO of Cubase Bio. “HeartBeat.bio is the ideal partner to translate our 3D spatial technology into actionable insights for complex cardiovascular disease.”