Breakthroughs with every beat
Biotech startup Dynomics creates scalable, authentic cardiac organoids to unlock the root causes of heart failure.
Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide. In Australia alone, each day 157 individuals experience an acute coronary event, and 112 suffer a stroke.
Current heart failure treatments focus on the aftermath, involving blood thinners, assistive devices and heart transplants, leading to a poor prognosis for many patients.
Medical professionals need better ways to predict and prevent these catastrophic events. We need a better understanding of the heart.
Innovative non-animal models are helping scientific research come to grips with the world’s number one killer. Researchers are using cardiac organoids to create more accurate mimics of the human heart. These devices reproduce the complex functions and conditions of the heart, helping scientists better understand heart diseases and develop more effective treatments.
Dynomics Co-Founder James Hudson and his team at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute have engineered human cardiac organoids that function similarly to adult human heart tissue. In their HeartDyno® system, human cardiac tissue, derived from pluripotent stem cells, is grown in a highly controlled environment in 96-well culture plates.
The HeartDyno® automates the formation of dense cardiac muscle bundles around a pair of elastic posts in each small well, from minimal cells and reagents.
After the growth phase, each well contains an individual cardiac organoid that contracts. The platform facilitates culture maintenance and automated force of contraction analysis without any tissue handling.
Dynomics’ system excels at managing metabolism in their culture system. By careful control of energy sources, the team can promote advanced maturation and function in their platform. This capability is crucial for developing sustainable, long-term cell culture systems that are a valuable addition to a researcher’s toolbox.
The HeartDyno® platform is a world-first cardiac organoid system that will illuminate the complex functions and responses of the heart. The platform is easily scalable to provide organoids in large numbers that exhibit the behaviour and physiology of mature heart tissue. Organoid response to stimuli and culture conditions correlates with clinical observation of heart disease.
Altogether, the HeartDyno® system shows great potential as a high-throughput screening platform to study genes and therapeutic drugs in a highly controlled and precise manner.
Dynomics’ HeartDyno® platform is quite complex to produce, so they teamed up with ANFF-QLD and ANFF-SA to manufacture moulds for their 96-well plates. ANFF facilitated the transition from traditional materials to aluminium. ANFF-SA is now using precision engineering to carve Dynomics’ mould designs out of aluminium blocks, polishing areas to ensure smooth surfaces for microscopy. This switch to aluminium greatly improves production efficiency, cutting down both time and costs, and enables scalability by enabling re-moulding hundreds of times from a single device.
To take the HeartDyno® platform to even greater heights, ANFF-C supported Dynomics to undertake an expert review to develop more advanced fabrication solutions. The company is currently progressing these and hopes to start producing their platforms via a large-scale manufacturing process.
The HeartDyno® system enables researchers to gain unprecedented insights into cardiac biology. Dynomics is poised to revolutionise heart disease treatment, addressing the root causes of heart failure and ultimately restoring heart function. The future of cardiac research looks brighter than ever with the HeartDyno® platform leading the way with every beat.
Published 15 October 2024 in ANFF’s 2024 Casebook ‘ANFF NEXT‘
Posted 17 March 2025
