GE Healthcare Highlights Predictive Accuracy of Cytiva™ hESC-derived Cardiomyocytes in Toxicity Testing

GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company, will announce preliminary data from its ongoing structural cardiomyocyte biomarker collaboration with Genentech, a member of the Roche Group. The preliminary data will be presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of The Society of Toxicology (SOT) in Washington D.C., 6 - 10 March 2011.

GE Healthcare and Genentech have been working together since September 2010 to assess and further explore the functional properties of GE Healthcare’s newly-launched Cytiva™ hESC-derived Cardiomyocyte toxicity assays and to identify novel cellular biomarkers for cardiotoxicity.

The collaboration combines Genentech’s toxicology expertise, experience with primary cardiomyocytes, and a library of reference compounds, with GE Healthcare’s Cytiva Cardiomyocytes and its IN Cell Analyzer high-content analysis (HCA)imaging system. GE Healthcare’s Cytiva Cardiomyocytes have so far been evaluated through blind testing against 26 known compounds with preclinical and clinical cardiac discordances.

Stephen Minger, Global Head of R&D, Cell Technologies, GE Healthcare, said: “The data we will be presenting far exceed our expectations and show that using Cytiva cardiomyocytes and the IN Cell HCA platform, we can probe deeply into cells to identify cardiotoxicity and how it is manifested. This will give our customers the confidence that our Cytiva Cardiomyocytes offer a far more effective alternative to current cell-based and animal models used in toxicology testing.”

Drug-treated Cytiva cardiomyocytes were analysed using GE Healthcare’s IN Cell Analyzer 2000 HCA system using a panel of fluorescent markers to report on drug effects on a wide range of cellular parameters. Multi-parameter analysis and data profile clustering revealed a wealth of information on drug toxicity and mode of action and showed good correlation with previously reported clinical cardiotoxicity.

The collaboration will be discussed at SOT by Genentech on March 6 and the preliminary data will be presented in depth by GE Healthcare on March 9.