The State of North Rhine-Westphalia supports the project ´Bionic Reactors for Cardiac Organoids (BiRonCa)’

Heart attacks (myocardial infarctions) cause irreversible loss of heart muscle, and while current treatments manage symptoms, they cannot restore cardiac function. The ability to produce cardiac organoids, 3D heart tissue grown from human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, offers a promising regenerative therapy to replace damaged tissue. To bring these therapies to patients, it is essential to produce organoids at clinical scale, maintaining consistent quality and quantity.

Professor Dr. Kurt Pfannkuche - leading a research team at the Center for Physiology and Pathophysiology, Faculty of Medicine and the Marga and Walter Boll-Laboratory for Cardiac Tissue Engineering addresses this key translational challenge. His research focuses on advancing scalable and controlled bioprocesses for the production of clinically relevant quantities of cardiac organoids, facilitating their future application in regenerative cardiac therapies. 

Professor Pfannkuche, who is also member of the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne, uses of cardiac organoids derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells for the treatment of cardiac infarction. 

To produce therapeutically relevant quantities of organoids for preclinical transplantation trials, bioreactor processes are being optimised and scaled up from a small 200 mL laboratory system to larger reactors with a volume of 2–3 litres. In a joint project with Biothrust GmbH (Aachen), an innovative gas transfer system is being tested that allows the reactors to be operated with higher cell densities. 

The Biothrust system is based on hollow fibres through which oxygen flows and is released into the cell culture medium without forming bubbles, while excess carbon dioxide is removed. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia is funding the ‘Bionic Reactors for Cardiac Organoids (BiRonCa)’ project for two years with around 850,000 euros.