Real-time measurements of 3D cardiac microtissue electrical activity integrated in a beating heart-on-chip

Drug discovery is a long and expensive process, whose efficiency is often limited due to the poor predictivity of in vitro models currently exploited in the pre-clinical phases. Among others, cardiac toxicity represents a prevalent adverse effect preventing the drug to reach the market. Here we present a new beating heart-on-chip platform able to generate functional 3D human cardiac microtissues, whose electrophysiological signals can be directly extracted during culture by means of an integrated electrical measurement system. Hence, the proposed microfluidic platform represents a powerful pre-clinical cardiac model to screen the cardiotoxic effects of new compounds.