SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NanoSurface Biomedical received $1.9 million in new funding in 2019 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support accelerated development of NanoSurface’s innovative human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-based platforms for drug discovery and safety screening. This funding announcement brings the total non-dilutive Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) funding NanoSurface has received from the NIH to $3.1 million. Under the terms of the funding awards, NanoSurface will receive an additional $1.5 million upon successful completion of scientific milestones.
The drug development process is enormously expensive, time consuming, and risky. Bringing a new drug to market costs over $2 billion and often takes over a decade. Cardiotoxicity is a leading cause of drug development failure and often remains undetected until late stage clinical trials or even after release to market, leading to high failure costs and potential patient harm. This has driven the need for more predictive models of human cardiac biology early in the drug development process.
NanoSurface’s proprietary technology advances the maturation of human iPSC-derived cardiac tissues in vitro to better predict the effect of candidate drugs in humans. “This SBIR funding will be used to develop NanoSurface’s innovative platform for modeling and assessing human cardiac function on-a-chip. Having obtained funding from both the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) demonstrates the synergy of our strategy to develop biological and instrumentation products for more predictive data, optimizing the drug development pipeline,” said Michael Cho, CEO of NanoSurface Biomedical.
“I am extraordinarily pleased at our team’s success in securing non-dilutive funding from the NIH. These awards underscore the value of NanoSurface’s technologies toward making the drug development process safer and more efficient as we help tackle some of the world’s most devastating diseases,” said Dr. Nicholas Geisse, PhD, Chief Science Officer of NanoSurface Biomedical. “These awards also further validate the excellence of NanoSurface’s team of expert biologists and engineers working side by side to tackle these enormous challenges.”
Research projects reported in this press release are supported by the NIH under Award Numbers HL149566, HL146043, EB028183, HL131169, EB029311. This content is solely the responsibility of NanoSurface Biomedical and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
About NanoSurface Biomedical
NanoSurface Biomedical is a biotechnology company based in Seattle, WA that develops stem cell-based assay technologies to accelerate drug development. NanoSurface’s structurally matured cardiac tissue models, assay instruments, and discovery services leverage human stem cell technology to help pharmaceutical companies predictively assess the safety and efficacy of candidate drugs early during preclinical development. NanoSurface’s mission is to help bring life-saving medicines to market in less time and at lower cost. To learn more, visit www.nanosurfacebio.com.
