HeartPrint: A 3D bioprinting platform for human cardiac tissue modeling and drug development

Using genomics-informed bio-inks, researchers will 3D-print heart tissue to better model disease and test drugs—paving the way for safer, more personalized treatments.

Heart disease is a leading cause of illness and death in Canada’s aging population and new treatment options are needed. Traditionally, developing these therapies is slow and costly. Animal models, while commonly relied on, are expensive and only approximate human heart physiology. In addition, many drugs fail during clinical trials. Ideally, reliable data on drug safety and efficacy could be obtained before reaching the clinical trial stage. But for this to happen, innovative technologies are needed. Fortunately, precision modeling of human heart function, using 3D engineered heart tissue, provides a solution.

Axolotl Biosciences, a Canadian start-up located in Victoria, BC, makes 3D bioprinting products that allow the production of humanized tissue models for research, including drug development. It provides reagents, bioinks and 3D tissue models for academic researchers and biotech companies.

This Genome Canada and Genome BC investment is helping Axolotl develop and commercialize two new bioink reagents. The first, HeartPrint, is being developed in collaboration with Dr. Zachary Laksman, in the Faculty of Medicine at UBC. His lab, which developed one of the first disease-in-a-dish models for heart disease, specializes in bioengineering, genomics, and cardiac physiology to support personalized medicine. HeartPrint will be an application-ready platform, using bioinks validated to work with human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), making them appealing for disease modeling and drug testing. Heartprint will allow researchers to 3D print human heart tissue in the lab.

The team will validate HeartPrint using genomics and functional analysis to ensure that printed tissues not only look like heart tissue but actually behave like the real thing. The goal is to reach a maturation state equivalent to, or exceeding, manually-engineered heart tissues currently used.

HeartPrint-M will be the company’s second-generation 3D cardiac model. Using genomics, they will identify and test factors to incorporate into HeartPrint with the goal of developing more mature, adult-like cardiac tissues using only iPSC (induced pluripotent stem cells)-derived heart cells. HeartPrint-M will be a unique reagent for both drug development, drug safety assays and disease modeling.

HeartPrint-M will include sex-specific versions of this bioink, allowing scientists to model key differences in male and female heart tissue, which has been a long-overlooked need in biomedical research. Starting from commercially-available cells, this technology should be a boon to personalized medicine and safety testing of new drugs.

The potential market for HeartPrint is large and increasing year-over-year as the interest in 3D bioprinting continues in both basic and applied research. Axolotl has leveraged its existing capabilities and protected intellectual property to take advantage of this opportunity.