Following the successful completion of our Phase I goals of prototyping, testing, and developing a new high-throughput cardiac myocyte acquisition system, IonOptix has been awarded Phase II funding from the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant awarded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) at the National Institute of Health (NIH). Phase II focuses on producing a desktop instrument capable of characterizing the physiological state of at least 10,000 cardiac myocytes per day, representing roughly a 1,000-fold increase in cell throughput compared to conventional technology.

This award will allow us to expedite the development of our groundbreaking MultiCell platform and help us to achieve our goal of accelerating investigations in: 1) basic research, enhancing our understanding of cardiac function in large cell populations rather than relying on very small samples, 2) safety pharmacology, allowing pre-clinical compounds to be more thoroughly tested before trials, and 3) drug development, enabling more compounds to be tested on both adult and hiPSC-cardiomyocytes during discovery.