“Cardiac biology is a perfect example of why 3D spatial context matters so much. The way cells organize in three dimensions is central to how a heart chamber is built and how it remodels during fibrosis. Our technology was built to capture that complexity in full 3D – something sectioning can’t assess, and 3D imaging hardware can’t do at scale,” says Malte Kühnemund, CEO of Cubase Bio.

FACTS-3D

The joint project, FACTS-3D (Fibrosis Analysis in Cardioids via Transcriptomic Spatial-mapping in 3D), is funded under Call 10 of the Eurostars program, with national funding from Vinnova in Sweden and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, and co-funding from the EU through Horizon Europe.

The partners will combine HeartBeat.bio’s Cardioid technology, human cardiac organoids used in drug discovery, with Cubase Bio’s 3D spatial transcriptomics platform, scalable to 96- and 384-well plate formats.

Heart failure affects more than 64 million people worldwide, and conventional preclinical tools such as animal models and 2D cell cultures often fail to capture the spatial complexity of human cardiac disease. FACTS-3D targets myocardial fibrosis, a key driver of cardiac remodeling in many forms of heart failure, aiming to identify disease mechanisms and generate new leads for drug targets.