Cardiac electrophysiology and arrhythmia phenotyping — from ion channel to beating heart

What we bring to a consortium

• Ion channel pharmacology and biophysics — manual and high-throughput automated patch-clamp, screening and mechanistic characterisation of channel modulators, including peptide and toxin-derived compounds.

• Human cellular models — hiPSC-derived cardiomyocytes, multi-electrode array (MEA) recordings, functional characterisation of disease-associated variants.

• Preclinical in vivo models — genetically modified mouse models of inherited arrhythmia syndromes (LQT3, Brugada, ARVC) and of heart failure-associated tachycardia; surface ECG and implanted telemetry in freely moving animals; pharmacological challenge protocols.

• Ex vivo whole-heart electrophysiology — Langendorff perfusion with combined optical and electrical mapping of conduction and repolarisation, arrhythmia inducibility testing, followed by histology.

• Implantable device testing — we have developed and validated wireless, battery-free implantable optoelectronic devices for in vivo modulation of cardiac excitability, with a working pipeline from device design to ECG readout in vivo.

Where this is useful

Cardiac safety and proarrhythmic liability assessment of new or repurposed compounds, including drug–drug combinations (relevant to HORIZON-HLTH-2027-01-CARE-02 on adverse drug reactions from multiple medications). Functional validation of variants identified by human genetics. Functional benchmarking of engineered cardiac tissues, organ-on-chip and other New Approach Methodologies — a human cardiac model is only qualified once its electrophysiology is shown to be faithful, and that measurement is what we provide. Target validation for arrhythmia and heart failure programmes.

How we can engage

As an academic partner leading or co-leading a work package, or as a core facility through the Therassay preclinical platform (Nantes), depending on what suits the consortium.

We are equally interested in partners who can bring what we lack: human tissue engineering, structural and molecular biology at scale, medicinal chemistry, imaging, and in silico modelling.