This technology is an adenoviral construct containing subunits of pacemaker channel genes that can provide a tool for measuring how different drugs affect cardiac rate.
Many drugs and medicines can have adverse effects on heart rate. Animal models for drug screening can be costly and time consuming, and don’t necessarily recreate the effects in human tissues. Although differentiation protocols to reprogram cardiac cells into the pacemaker phenotype are in development, further studies are needed to characterize those models. Other existing screens provide only low throughput in isolated tissue or intact animal or cell-culture systems.
This technology is an adenoviral construct that encodes either mammalian HCN channel genes or MIRP1, alpha and beta subunits of pacemaker current proteins respectively. When expressed in a mammalian cardiac cell or other excitable cell line of cardiac origin, this construct can serve as the basis of a cell-based bioassay for the study of drugs or agents that alter cardiac rate.
This technology has been validated in ventricle cell cultures.
Patent Issued (US 6,849,611) Patent Issued (US 7,122,307)
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Licensing Contact: Jerry Kokoshka