Medera is the parent holding company, which fully owns the subsidiaries Novoheart and Sardocor. Medera also has investments in other portfolio companies. Each of Novoheart and Sardocor has their own independent teams.

Founded in 2014, Novoheart has the longest history in commercializing human cardiac tissue engineering for disease modeling and drug screening. Our founders were among the first-generation biomedical engineers who started the fields back in the late 90s. Novoheart has the industry’s most sophisticated and comprehensive human cardiac tissue engineering platform and the only Human-Heart-in-a-Jar.

Novoheart was previously dually publicly-listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Frankfurt Stock Exchange before its acquisition and privatization by the Medera group in 2020. The merger allows Novoheart as a Medera portfolio company to have access to highly specialised expertise in clinical trials from IND applications to patient enrollment as well as advanced cGMP manufacturing of gene and cell products for patients, providing a one-stop platform for Novoheart as well as its clients and partners.

Founded in 2019 by the scientific pioneers who started the fields of Cardiac Gene Therapy over three decades ago at the Massachusetts General Hospital of Harvard, Sardocor is a fully owned subsidiary of the Medera Group.

Sardocor is a clinical stage complany dedicated to novel gene and cell therapies for patients with incurable diseases. With three ongoing gene therapy clinical trials, Sardocor is currently second to none in terms of the number of FDA Investigational New Drug (IND) approvals and clinical stage maturity in the cardiovascular space. Sardocor’s flagship clinical programs are for Heart Failure with preserved Ejection Fraction (HFpEF) and Duchenne Muscular  Dystrophy (DMD)-related Cardiomyopathy. Please see www.sardocor.com for further information.

Novoheart’s mission and vision is to revolutionize drug discovery and the development of heart therapeutics with superior safety and efficacy. Novoheart offers a one stop solution for your cardiac research by pioneering an array of next generation human cardiac tissue models through our suite of proprietary technologies the mini Heart Platform. We offer expertise in areas including cardiac mechanics and electrophysiology, stem cell biology, tissue engineering, hardware/software engineering, machine learning, drug screening, disease modelling and more. 

In addition to the heart, Novoheart has also introduced other mini-organ systems such as the liver, vasculature, immune cells, gut and bile duct.

The Human "Heart-in-a-Jar" refers to Novoheart's human mini-heart or the so-called human ventricular cardiac organoid chamber (hvCOC), which is a functioning biological heart pump. It is a miniature ventricle that can generate pressure, eject fluid, and conduct electrical signals in manners resembling an actual human heart, but on a much smaller scale. This allows Novoheart's customers to uniquely obtain measurements of cardiac pump performance, like systolic pressure, ejection fraction, cardiac output, stroke work, and diastolic compliance - measurements that cardiologists use to evaluate patient heart function. This makes it more straightforward to generate data that can be used for preclinical validation of novel therapeutics to strengthen IND applications for regulatory approval, providing an advanced human-specific alternative to animal testing consistent with the FDA Modernization Act 2.0.

As published, the mini-heart system also provides a unique pro-maturation environment to render the cells and tissues as well as their physiological and pharmacological properties more adult-like. 

• Friedreich’s Ataxia (FRDA)
• Heart Failure with preserved Ejection Fraction (HFpEF)Duchene Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) 
• Drug Induced LQT Syndromes Familial Cardiomyopathy 
• Dilated Cardiomyopathy, Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy 
• Brugada Syndrome 
• Hypokalemia 
• Congenital Heart Diseases 
• Hypoplastic Right Heart Syndrome, Tetralogy of Fallot, Isomerism 
• SARS-COV-2 Infection and vaccines related myocarditis

The above are just select examples. If you do not see your disease of interest here, please do not hesitate to contact us.

We have a broad definition of cell and tissue maturation that includes expression of key cardiac-specific molecular markers such as MLC2v, MYH7/MYH6, TNNI3, PLN, and ATP2A2; comprehensive multi-omics profiling; structural features such as myofibrillar alignment, gap junctions, T-tubules and mitochondrial organization; and functional performance such as positive FFR and strong response to beta-adrenergic stimulation. Novoheart has a long history of characterizing and advancing the maturation stage of hPSC-derived cardiomyocytes in 2D cultures and 3D tissues using a range of IP-protected techniques including genetic engineering, biochemical treatment, electrical conditioning, structural alignment, and cardiomimetic niche replication.

Yes. Novoheart offers a series of products from do-in-yourself kits for engineering your own 2D/3D human heart tissues to instruments and hardware for automation (link to Our products).

Novoheart also offers consultation and services to design and perform the needed disease modelling and drug screening experiments for you(link to services). 

Please contact our specialists at sales@novoheart.com. If you are a company seeking in-licensing and corporate partnership opportunities, please contact bd@novoheart.com.

The miniorgan systems that we offer include - liver, immune, vascular, lung, gut, and bile.

Drug development is an inefficient and costly process due to the long time required to bring a drug to market (10 years or more) and high failure rate in doing so (nine out of ten drugs that enter clinical trials will never make it to FDA approval). These failures are often due to unexpeted cardiotoxicity, both for heart therapies that do not work as expected, as well as off-target effects of non-cardiac drugs. This is partly due to a leap of faith in going from pre-clinical testing in animals, to clinical trials in humans. Therefore, Novoheart focuses on providing the most advanced human species-specific heart model systems for early pre-clinical testing and iterative optimization of new drugs before entering clinical trials, which is critically important for reducing associated costs and failures, and improving the safety and efficacy of next-generation therapies of all kinds.

We are able to test it for you. Human ventricular Cardiac Organoid Chamber (hvCOC) aka Human Heart-in-a-Jar is the most mature and sensitive tissue testing platform for electrophysiology, contractility and unique clinical parameters such as such as PV loops, cardiac outputs. Depending on your need, we can also have quick testings with the human ventricular Cardiomyocyte (hvCM), human ventricular Cardiac Anisotropic Sheet (hvCAS) or human ventricular Cardiac Tissue Strip (hvCTS) as they requires fewer CM per tissue so they are higher-throuphut platforms to start with. Normally we would recommend n=9-15 (3 independent batch of n=3-5) for each testing conditions, which can be customized based on the scope of your testing.

Novoheart recommends starting with our hvCTS or microCTS for contractility and hvCAS for electrophysiology. Once promising candidates are identified within the larger set, it is advisable to use the high-biofidelity hvCOC system, which allows for more sophisticated experimental protocols to collect the most physiologically relevant human heart data at high resolution.

At our company, it takes a new hire 2 weeks to pick up this skill. After sharing our straightforward tissue fabrication protocols and getting customers set up with this turnkey system, they can be collecting data from tissues fabricated in their own lab within the first month. 

Yes, we have a wide range of healthy hESC-hvCM and healthy vs disease hiPSC-hvCM. We can even differentiate your own iPSC/hESC line(s).

Experimental timeline varies from 1 to 12 months, depending on the scope and complexity of work. If needed, it will start with customizing the healthy or disease hvCM you required for your study. Then we will start the tissue fabrication phase, followed by the disease modelling or drug screening phase. The data will then be processed and analyzed once they are ready. We will report to you the progress and result at different milestones.

Yes, Novoheart as the drug discovery engine of Medera group has supported the gene therapeutic product development of Sardocor by developing the first human HFpEF engineered cardiac tissue model and tested it with Sardocor's candidate. These results have successfully led to an IND.