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Project abstract
The BATTITO project (an ERC Proof of Concept) aims to revolutionize preclinical drug testing by tackling one of the pharmaceutical industry's biggest challenges: unexpected cardiac toxicity, the leading cause of drug development failure. Each year, hundreds of promising drug candidates are discontinued in late-stage development due to unforeseen cardiotoxic effects, resulting in enormous financial losses for the industry and significant delays in patient access to innovative therapies. Current laboratory models often fail to accurately predict human heart responses, largely because they rely on cells cultured in two-dimensional environments that lack the structural and functional complexity of real cardiac tissue.
To overcome this limitation, BATTITO — developed through a close collaboration between Politecnico di Milano and its spin-off BiomimX — introduces the first fully automated and "smart" heart-on-a-chip. The core of this innovation is uHeart, a miniaturized, beating 3D model of human cardiac tissue that faithfully recapitulates the mechanical and functional properties of the human myocardium. uHeart is combined with an Artificial Intelligence-driven control system that fundamentally transforms the experimental approach. Instead of passively observing the tissue, the system learns and adapts mechanical stimuli in real-time based on the cells' condition, autonomously guiding the tissue toward an optimal, standardized maturation state in a reproducible manner.
This approach will drastically reduce experimental variability, one of the primary barriers to the broad adoption of organ-on-chip models in the pharmaceutical industry. Ultimately, BATTITO will provide pharmaceutical companies with a highly reliable and rapid screening tool to assess drug safety from the earliest development stages, enabling more informed decision-making, saving significant development resources, and — critically — reducing the reliance on animal testing in alignment with the principles of the 3Rs (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement).
