Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

Heart failure is the leading cause of death and disability within Canada, creating significant medical and socioeconomic costs. Developing new therapies for heart failure is challenging, primarily because we do not have good ways to model the action of heart cells. Similarly, certain medications are known to have adverse effects on the heart (particularly cancer chemotherapeutics), although the degree of adverse effect is tremendous. Determining which medications a patient can (or cannot) receive safely also suffers from the lack of ability to properly model the action of the heart. Our collaborative group has worked together to develop new ways to measure heart cell function in ways that accurately represent what happens in the patient. As part of this work, we are developing a new platform device that uses carbon nanotubes to quantify the complex function of the heart cell. This device will allow for simultaneous measurement of the key components of heart cell function - beating rate, beating rhythm and contractility (how much the heart cell, and therefore the heart, can squeeze blood out). There is currently no single device that can quantify all of these metrics, limiting the development of new medications for heart failure and limiting the testing of medications for their potential damage to the heart. Using heart cells derived from patients who have had severe reactions to heart toxic medications, we will show how we could have predicted the heart failure that occurred in these patients, and how our device would have been able to guide therapy choices. Capitalizing on the creation of patient-derived heart cells, our platform technology will allow for accurate modeling of heart cell action, leading to the development of new medications for heart failure or determining if a particular patient can receive a certain drug without experiencing adverse effects on the heart.