HeartBeat.bio AG, a Vienna, Austria-based spin-off company of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA), raised EUR 1.5m in seed financing.
red-stars.com data AG made the investment.
The company intends to use the funds to establish operations, build up an experienced team over the next 12 months, and develop the Cardioid technology into a platform solution for compound screening.
Led by Michael Krebs, CEO, HeartBeat.bio is developing a high-throughput 3D screening platform for heart diseases using self-organizing human cardiac organoids (Cardioids). The Cardioid technology has been invented by the Mendjan lab at IMBA, a leading hub in organoid research.
This human organoid screening platform enables the automated, reproducible, and cost-effective large-scale generation and analysis of cardiac organoids, making it suitable for high-throughput compound screenings.
The drug discovery program will focus on heart failure and cardiomyopathies as well as cardiotoxicity studies for new drug candidates.
HeartBeat.bio has signed an exclusive license and collaboration agreement with IMBA and will closely cooperate with the research group of Sasha Mendjan to further develop the technology.
Besides red-stars, the company has already received financial support from AWS – via the AWS Pre-Seed Program which is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs (BMDW) and the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK) – and from Vienna’s high-tech incubator INiTS via its AplusB Scaleup Program.
FinSMEs
04/05/2021