Side effects associated with the heart are usually checked during drug tests on laboratory animals, and then on volunteers.

Now, after 10 years of active work, scientists from the UK have presented a simulating beating heart that will allow you to test drugs without using humans and animals.

Dr. Helen Maddock of the Center for Applied Biology of the University of Coventry, an expert in the physiology of the cardiovascular system and pharmacology, believes that the new technology will improve the quality of treatment and save hundreds of lives of people who are at risk during clinical trials.

This technology in vitro (literally - "in vitro") works exclusively in the laboratory, without the participation of a living organism. Roughly said, the doctor connected on a special framework parts of cardiac muscle tissue that contract and relax under the action of electrical impulses from an artificial conductive system. This invention allows imitating biomechanical processes in the heart muscle.

Researchers can apply the study drug to the tissue to see its effect on the contractile function of the myocardial fibers. Previously, for this, it was necessary to introduce a new medicine to animals, which often gave vague results, was a very costly and, to put it mildly, inhuman process.

Since one of the main reasons for the failure of many pharmaceutical innovations are the negative effects from the heart, Dr. Maddock's technology can make a real revolution in the development and testing of new drugs.

The ability to save years in the development of medicines.

Its technology, called the "simulator of the cardiovascular system" - is the most accurate and realistic dynamic model of the heart. It allows at very early stages of development with the help of simple experiments to determine the possible cardiovascular effects of drugs without wasting time and big money for testing animals.

In addition to the saved living creatures, this device is capable for many years to accelerate the development of drugs, immediately screening out those substances that are toxic to the heart.

"I am very glad that our research is at the stage when we can say with certainty: we created the only clinically useful dynamic model of the human heart. It can save years in the development of drugs of a very diverse spectrum of action, "says Dr. Maddock.

In order to introduce the new technology into the modern pharmaceutical industry, the creator of the device founded the company InoCardia Ltd at the university, which already managed to receive 250,000 pounds (about $ 427,000) from the British Mercia Fund Management.

Dr. Maddock adds: "Both the pharmaceutical industry and regulators understand that the existing methods of assessing heart contractility in drug testing are problematic, so we are very inspired by the opportunity to present them with a new method that does not require the use of animals and humans".

medbe. en.

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