HeartBeat.bio and Cubase Bio Partner to Advance 3D Spatial Transcriptomics for Cardiovascular Drug Discovery

€1M Eurostars funding supports joint development of a high-throughput 3D spatial profiling approach for myocardial fibrosis and heart failure drug discovery.

VIENNA, Austria and STOCKHOLM, Sweden - 08 September, 2026 - HeartBeat.bio AG, a TechBio company developing a human cardiac organoid-based drug discovery platform, and Cubase Bio, a genomics company developing true 3D spatial transcriptomics technologies, today announced a strategic research collaboration to advance spatial profiling of human cardiac organoids for cardiovascular drug discovery.

The partners have been awarded ca. €1M in funding under Call 10 of the prestigious Eurostars program for their joint project, "Fibrosis Analysis in Cardioids via Transcriptomic Spatial-mapping in 3D" (FACTS-3D). National funding is provided by Vinnova (Sweden’s Innovation Agency) and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), with co-funding from the European Union through Horizon Europe. This project will combine HeartBeat.bio’s proprietary Cardioid technology with Cubase Bio’s 3D spatial transcriptomics platform to develop a scalable approach for analyzing the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying myocardial fibrosis.

Despite significant advances in cardiovascular research, the development of new therapies for heart failure remains challenging. Heart failure affects more than 64 million people worldwide and represents a major and growing global health burden. Conventional preclinical tools, such as animal models and 2D cell cultures, often fail to fully capture the complexity of human biology, cellular interactions, and the spatial organization of underlying cardiac diseases.

FACTS-3D aims to address this gap by combining physiologically relevant human cardiac organoids with high-throughput 3D spatial transcriptomics. Traditional 2D spatial transcriptomics techniques are restricted to thin tissue sections, making them fundamentally mismatched for high-throughput organoid analysis. Utilizing Cubase Bio’s innovative true 3D spatial technology, scalable to 96- and 384-well plate formats, this project will investigate HeartBeat.bio’s human Cardioids within their full, three-dimensional tissue context.

This approach is particularly relevant to myocardial fibrosis, a key driver of cardiac remodeling and a disease phenotype associated with many forms of heart failure. By resolving gene expression and cellular states within intact 3D cardiac tissue, the partners aim to identify disease mechanisms, characterize treatment responses and generate new insights for target discovery and drug development.

"The FACTS-3D project brings together two highly complementary technologies to address one of the major challenges in cardiovascular drug discovery: understanding disease biology in a physiologically relevant human context while retaining the spatial information that is essential for complex cardiac phenotypes," said Michael Krebs, CEO of HeartBeat.bio. "For HeartBeat.bio, this collaboration represents an important step toward using Cardioids not only for phenotypic drug discovery, but also to uncover and validate novel mechanisms and targets for heart failure, particularly in myocardial fibrosis and cardiac remodeling."

"Cardiac biology is a perfect example of why 3D spatial context matters so much. The way cells organize in three dimensions is central to how a heart chamber is built, what happens when fibrosis occurs and how the heart remodels itself. Our technology was built to capture exactly that kind of complexity in full 3 dimensions. It cannot be assessed by sectioning, and 3D imaging hardware lacks the throughput. This makes our 3D spatial transcriptomics technology a natural fit for high-throughput cardiac drug screening", said Malte Kühnemund, CEO of Cubase Bio. "HeartBeat.bio is the ideal partner to translate our 3D spatial technology into actionable insights for complex cardiovascular disease."

About the Eurostars Program    

Eurostars is a funding instrument that supports innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and project partners in international collaborative R&D and innovation projects. By pooling resources from national governments and the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, Eurostars helps businesses turn scientific research into market-ready products, processes, and services. The program is part of the European Partnership on Innovative SMEs.

For more information, visit eurekanetwork.org.                                                      

About HeartBeat.bio AG

HeartBeat.bio AG is a pioneering TechBio company developing breakthrough therapies for heart failure through its next-generation Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform. This proprietary platform integrates iPSC-derived cardiac organoids with advanced automation and AI-driven analytics to enable scalable, human-centric drug discovery. Utilizing physiologically relevant and scalable human model systems, HeartBeat.bio enhances translational predictability, shortens development timelines, and reduces clinical failure rates.

The company is advancing its own therapeutic pipeline while strategically partnering with pharma and biotech companies to co-develop transformative heart failure treatments. Initial focus areas include cardiomyopathies, myocardial fibrosis, and its effects on cardiac remodeling, a chronic disease phenotype prevalent in most heart failure patients.

HeartBeat.bio was founded in 2021 and is located at the Vienna Biocenter in Austria, one of the leading life science clusters in Europe. The company received private investments by aws Gründungsfonds II, i&i Biotech Fund, Invest AG, red-stars.com data AG, and Tensor Ventures Fund as well as grants from the Austrian promotional bank (AWS), Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and the Vienna Business Agency.

For further information, please visit www.heartbeat.bio or follow us on LinkedIn.

About CubaseBio

Cubase Bio is a Stockholm-based spatial biology company founded in 2024 by innovators in spatial biology and genomics technologies to build tools that reveal spatial biology in its true three dimensional form. While biology is inherently three-dimensional, the field has been historically tethered to thin, two-dimensional sections that lose critical architectural context. Cubase Bio disrupts this paradigm through a proprietary technology that leverages molecular networks to encode spatial proximity directly within a 3D sample. By using standard short-read DNA sequencing to decode these proximity barcode networks, Cubase Bio's software computationally reconstructs tissue architecture in 3D, entirely bypassing the need for specialized optical imaging hardware. This creates a uniquely cost-effective and scalable solution specifically designed for high-throughput organoid screening and drug development that demands true 3D spatial context.

For more information, visit www.cubasebio.com or follow us on LinkedIn.