Novoheart Files for Patent on Pioneering New Multi-organoid Bioreactor Platform

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Nov. 30, 2017) - Novoheart ("Novoheart" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:NVH), a global stem cell biotechnology company, today announced that it has filed a provisional patent application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a versatile bioreactor platform that is used to culture, stimulate, and monitor the function of multiple engineered human-tissue organoids. The proprietary bioreactor system, which comprises hardware for organoid maintenance, manipulation and recording, together with customized software for seamless data processing and analysis, is designed to increase throughput, deliver heightened consistency, and extend stimulation and monitoring capabilities. Ultimately, the new technology enhances Novoheart's capacity and further expands its ability to identify promising bioactive therapeutics, classify toxicity of unknown drugs and pioneer innovative methods of addressing diseases or disorders.

Drug development is a notoriously lengthy, expensive and inefficient process, typically costing US$2-3bn and taking more than 10 years to develop a single drug, with unacceptably high failure rates of around 90%. Cardiac toxicity has been a major contributing factor, and conventional non-human cell and animal models are part of the problem: they are poorly predictive of human responses, leading to false negative and false positive results that compromise overall successes. Bioartificial tissue-engineered organoids represent a potent technology to revolutionize drug screening by improving the ability to predict the effects of newly developed drugs in a human-specific model system. The expected results are minimized patient harm and significantly reduced screening costs through eliminating toxic drug candidates early in pre-clinical development. The provisional patent covers the design of a bioreactor platform for tissue-engineered human organoids with an array of innovative tools to support organoid development and improve analysis of their functional response to therapeutics.

The first applications of the bioreactor will be to evaluate the efficacy and toxicity of cardioactive drugs on human ventricular cardiac organoid chambers (hvCOC), a part of Novoheart's MyHeart™ Platform. The modular design of the bioreactor allows multiple organoids to be combined for increased throughput of the semi-automated culture and testing process. Additionally, the interconnected bioreactor design makes it uniquely able to simultaneously culture a variety of bio-engineered organoids, such as liver, kidney or brain organoids, and allow them to communicate with one another through a circulatory-like fluidic system, simulating how organs react to drugs as an integrated system. The provisional patent application is expected to mature into a full patent and provide commercial protection for the bioreactor technology.

"The pinnacle of Novoheart's MyHeart™ Platform is the hvCOC, or human heart-in-a-jar, which provides a unique combination of electrophysiology and contractility measures most informative to cardiologists," said Novoheart CSO Kevin Costa. "By automating some of the existing labor-intensive processes such as data acquisition and analysis, this patent application represents the introduction of a very exciting new combination of hardware and software that will enable us to increase not only the quantity but the quality of hvCOCs that can be tested, and begin to integrate these with other organoid systems in a way that captures the complex systems-level physiology of the human body."

Novoheart CEO Ronald Li said, "The result is that we will be able to deliver more predictive pre-clinical assays for our clients that will help them significantly reduce costs, ensure safety and efficacy of new therapeutics, and maximize success rates, thereby ultimately creating new values to our investors."

About Novoheart:

Novoheart is a global stem cell biotechnology company pioneering an array of next-generation human heart tissue prototypes. It is the first company in the world to have engineered miniature living human heart pumps that can revolutionize drug discovery, helping to save time and money for developing new therapeutics.

Also known as 'human heart-in-a-jar', Novoheart's bioartificial human heart constructs are created using state-of-the-art stem cell and bioengineering approaches, and are utilized by drug developers for accurate preclinical testing as to the effectiveness and safety of new drugs, maximizing the successes in drug discovery whilst minimizing costs and harm caused to patients.

The Company is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSXV") under the symbol "NVH".

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

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