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HeartBeat.bio and Cubase Bio have secured approximately €1 million in Eurostars funding for a collaborative project combining human cardiac organoids with 3D spatial transcriptomics to support research into myocardial fibrosis and heart failure.
The FACTS-3D project – Fibrosis Analysis in Cardioids via Transcriptomic Spatial-mapping in 3D – will bring together HeartBeat.bio’s Cardioid technology and Cubase Bio’s 3D spatial transcriptomics platform.
Funding has been awarded under Call 10 of the Eurostars programme, with national support provided by Sweden’s Innovation Agency Vinnova and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), alongside European Union co-funding through Horizon Europe.
The collaboration aims to develop a scalable method for investigating the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in myocardial fibrosis, an important driver of cardiac remodelling associated with many forms of heart failure.
Current preclinical approaches, including animal models and conventional 2D cell cultures, can struggle to reproduce the complexity of human cardiac biology and the spatial relationships between different cell types.
FACTS-3D will instead combine physiologically relevant human cardiac organoids with high-throughput 3D spatial transcriptomics. Cubase Bio’s technology can analyse organoids within their complete three-dimensional tissue environment and is designed to scale to 96- and 384-well plate formats.
This differs from conventional 2D spatial transcriptomics, where analysis is generally performed using thin tissue sections. Maintaining the complete 3D structure could provide researchers with additional information about how cells are organised and interact during disease progression and in response to potential treatments.
By mapping gene expression and cellular states within intact cardiac tissue, the partners aim to improve understanding of myocardial fibrosis, identify disease mechanisms and evaluate treatment responses.
The resulting approach could also support the identification and validation of new therapeutic targets, providing another tool for cardiovascular drug discovery and the development of potential treatments for heart failure.
