HeLiVa platform: integrated heart-liver-vascular systems for drug testing in human health and disease

Our project team is developing an integrated microphysiological platform with functionally connected vascular, liver and cardiac microtissues derived from a single line of human pluripotent stem cells. The platform enables functional representation of human physiology in conjunction with real-time biological readouts (via imaging and homologous reporters for all three cell phenotypes) and compatibility with high-throughput/high-content analysis. In this paper, we summarize progress made over the first year of the grant.