IN THE HEART OF THINGS

This Hong Kong based biotech company is creating the world’s first ever miniature beating human heart.

- Punita Sabharwal

While the stereotypical tech entrepreneur is a young software engineer, the biotech startup world is dominated by entrepreneurs with decades of experience in big pharma. Same is the case with Novoheart which is using biotech to change the way human life functions. In the last decade, biotechnologists have made a slew of breakthroughs—from synthesizing entire genomes to developing precision gene editing techniques. These developments will inevitably shape our future. Biology’s potential is tantalizing, but the qualities that make it so are the same that make it difficult to work with and potentially risky. But if there’s any hope of deploying future technology in a thoughtful way this will change the course.

Heart failure (HF) is a global pandemic with its pathological mechanisms and diverse etiology poorly understood. Due to these complexities, models of the disease available to date, including various animal models, have limited ability to mimic the clinical presentation of HF. Therefore, drug developers lack an effective tool for preclinical testing of drug candidates for efficacy, and as a result, clinical outcomes for HFpEF have not improved over the last decades, with no effective therapies available.