Fresh off $598M deal with No­vo Nordisk, a Japan­ese stem cell com­pa­ny is on its way to the clin­ic with a dif­fer­ent ap­proach to treat­ing heart fail­ure

A com­mon ap­proach to treat­ing heart fail­ure with in­duced pluripo­tent stem cells in­volves graft­ing sheets of cells on­to the sur­face of the heart to im­prove vas­cu­lar­iza­tion and blood flow. It’s the eas­i­est method of trans­plan­ta­tion — but you run the risk of not mak­ing an elec­tri­cal con­nec­tion with the heart and the cells not syn­chro­niz­ing with the pa­tient’s heart mus­cle.

So what if you could in­ject spher­i­cal clus­ters of heart cells di­rect­ly in­to the heart mus­cle wall? For Heart­seed, that’s now the $37 mil­lion ques­tion.

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