SBIR Phase II: Physiologic High Throughput Screening of Bioengineered Tissues

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II research develops an innovative high-throughput/high content drug screening platform that utilizes three-dimensional human skeletal muscle tissue constructs that mimic in vivo skeletal muscle to quantify muscle force generation. Significant demands exist for new drugs to treat contractility disorders involving skeletal muscle. Myomics' proposed drug testing platform will contribute to significant reductions in time and costs associated with bringing new drugs to market by discovering drug candidates and eliminating ineffective compounds earlier than currently possible. Unlike existing systems, this approach incorporates biomechanics into drug discovery using mechanical sensors to detect contraction of multiple identical tissue samples over extended time periods. Significant socioeconomic and quality-of-life impacts will result for patients with contractility disorders (sarcopenia, atrophy, or Duchennes muscular dystrophy). While most drug screening protocols test one protein pathway at a time, this platform provides a unique physiological screening system and protocol which quantifies contraction as the result of multiple protein pathways interacting over time. The broader impacts of this research will be to enhance muscle contractility disorder/disease research and provide new tools to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries for drug discovery. Upon successful development, the sensing mechanism will potentially be used to develop treatments for several contractile tissues relevant to a range of important human contractile disorders and diseases contributing to improved outcomes for these diseases.