TARA Biosystems' Groundbreaking Biowire™ II Heart-on-a-Chip Platform Earns Acclaim from Frost & Sullivan

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 25, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the North American heart-on-a-chip market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes TARA Biosystems with the 2018 North American Technology Innovation Award for its trailblazing Biowire™ II heart-on-a-chip platform. This solution produces mature, engineered, human cardiac tissues and demonstrates promise as a valuable predictive tool for cardiac drug discovery and development. It can potentially advance precision care using patient-derived, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)-generated cardiomyocyte cell lines to identify a patient's specific treatment needs.

"TARA's in vitro Biowire™ II heart-on-a-chip model employs iPSCs to generate cardiac tissues. The platform biomimetically exercises the immature tissue until it exhibits the characteristics of adult human cardiac tissue," said Deepak Jayakumar, Senior research analyst. "These engineered tissues closely mimic functional human heart muscles, which, in turn, allows pharmaceuticals to predict the side effects and therapeutic efficacy of their drugs, without the need for animal or human testing."

In addition to accelerating the drug discovery and development process, Biowire™ II, due to its high degree of physiological human-relevancy, can decrease associated costs by providing better human translation data than what is possible from existing assays and animal model studies. It can also help eliminate drugs that have unacceptable levels of cardiotoxicity early in the drug discovery process and highlight the elements that aid in the design of superior drugs.

Some of the unique functional metrics of the Biowire™ II platform-produced cardiac tissues are positive force-frequency, inotropic response, improved post-rest potentiation, decreased spontaneous beating, improved structural alignment, and adult-like action potential. The platform is capable of measuring important metrics of human cardiac physiology such as maximum force, rates of contraction, relaxation, calcium handling, electrophysiology, gene expression and structure. These established functional metrics empower the Biowire™ II heart-on-a-chip platform to ascertain whether a new drug is improving the normal pumping mechanism of the heart and whether the improvement is due to the heart not filling up or because it was unable to distribute blood.

"Additionally, the Biowire™ II platform can engineer tissues that accurately mimic specific human heart failure phenotypes. These diseased tissue constructs can be employed in the discovery and development of novel medicines to treat heart failure phenotypes as well as in toxicology studies," noted Deepak. "Unlike most organ-on-a-chip companies that develop multi-organ chips or several single organ-on-a-chip platforms, TARA Biosystems singularly focuses on the development of heart-on-a-chip technology. This enables the company to deliver a platform capable of comprehensively measuring functional metrics that can reveal deep insights for use in cardiac safety and mechanistic studies."

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has developed a product with innovative features and functionality that is gaining rapid acceptance in the market. The award recognizes the quality of the solution and the customer value enhancements it enables.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

About TARA Biosystems

TARA Biosystems is a human heart-on-a-chip company headquartered in New York which has developed a proprietary platform of cardiac tissue models.  Through these physiologically human-relevant predictive models, the company offers a variety of services and solutions that can decisively evaluate the safety and efficacy of novel biopharmaceutical drugs and strengthen the drug discovery, and development pipeline.

About Frost & Sullivan
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SOURCE Frost & Sullivan