Cardiovascular Disease

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide, affecting hundreds of millions of people and placing a heavy burden on healthcare systems. Early intervention and expanding treatment options have served to better manage CVDs, improving outcomes and reducing mortality, yet disease prevalence is expected to rise significantly. Recent advances including improved risk prediction, anti-obesity drugs, and targeted therapies, have helped reduce major cardiovascular events and expand treatment options across drug classes. Innovative, multi-mechanistic, and precision-oriented approaches are needed to enhance outcomes across comorbidities and improve patients’ quality of life.

Evotec has built a powerful and versatile CVD drug discovery engine, integrating cutting-edge technologies and multiomics-driven approaches to enable precision medicine. Our platform supports long-term partnerships and a range of R&D programs, combining deep expertise in iPSC-based drug discovery, CRISPR-based disease modeling, cardiac fibrosis, 3D cell systems, high-throughput cardiotoxicity screening, translational biomarkers, and deep subject matter expertise to accelerate drug discovery and development. 

Despite decades of intensive research, cardiovascular and heart failure management still face major limitations. Early-stage CVD is often associated with vague symptoms and overlapping biomarkers, which makes diagnosis difficult and leads to delayed detection. Standard therapies frequently fail to improve survival due to limited efficacy and high patient variability, underscoring the need for personalized approaches. A major challenge is that the onset and progression of disease are not well understood, since healthy or early-stage human heart biopsies are extremely rare. 

We have built a large high resolution multiomics atlas of the human heart, leveraging truly translational data from human cardiac tissue. Our unmatched access to healthy, early-risk, and diseased patient samples, advanced high resolution multiomics, high-quality clinical and histopathology data, AI-powered analytics & our interdisciplinary expertise at Evotec enabling highly innovative discoveries.  

• Unravel complex mechanisms driving disease progression
• Identify early molecular signatures for preclinical detection
• Discover and validates novel targets for therapeutic intervention
• Enable patient stratification and biomarker identification for tailored treatment strategies and clinical trial design 

Evotec’s Heart Atlas provides an unprecedented foundation to develop the next generation of pharmacotherapies in CVD. By integrating high resolution single cell and spatial transcriptomics, genomics, proteomics, clinical data and histopathology we: 

• Identify novel targets and biomarkers linked to early disease progression 
• Conduct comparative cardio-renal and cardiometabolic analyses to uncover overlapping and distinct mechanisms 
• Apply deep spatial multiomic profiling to map disease pathology in tissues on (sub-)cellular level 

Our platform is powered by application and thorough analysis of state-of-the-art spatial multiomics assays, enabling high resolution insights into cardiac tissue architecture and molecular dynamics, such as:  

• Spatial proteomics (in-house technology)
• Visium multiome™
• VisiumHD™
• Xenium™ technology 

 These technologies support: 

• Target identification for selected indications of high clinical relevance
• Mechanistic understanding of disease evolution at cellular and tissue levels
• Clinical translation of early stage discoveries into relevant therapies 

Understanding and treating cardiac diseases requires models that reflect disease-relevant cellular mechanisms driving pathology in the human heart. Traditional cell lines fall short, lacking the complexity and genetic diversity needed to capture disease mechanisms. Evotec’s iPSC-derived cardiomyocyte platform offers a physiologically relevant, genetically diverse system for modeling cardiac disease and discovering new therapies. 

Our scalable platform integrates a broad bank of well-characterized human iPSC (hiPSC) lines and optimized differentiation protocols enabling the generation of multiple human cardiac cell types including cardiomyocytes, fibroblasts, 2D co-cultures, 3D spheroids, and engineered heart tissue. Advanced genome editing tools like CRISPR/Cas9 and RNAi allow us to model specific cardiac pathologies and validate novel targets in a human cell system.

We combine high-throughput phenotyping using MEA-based electrophysiology, xCELLigence and FlexCyte contractility assays, and calcium transient assays to ensure sensitivity and relevance. This comprehensive approach streamlines screening cascades and accelerates cardiac drug discovery and safety assessments. 

Evotec’s hiPSC cardiomyocyte platform, combined with the Evotec Heart Atlas, offers a human-relevant platform for cardiac disease modeling, target validation, and mechanistic investigation. Together, these platforms accelerate CVD drug discovery and support improved clinical translation through precision medicine-focused approaches. 

We offer a comprehensive suite of primary and immortalized human and mouse fibrosis cell models, including Cas9-engineered cell lines for CRISPR editing, primary fibroblasts, cardiac endothelial, pericyte, and myoblast models. Our platform supports both 2D and 3D mono- and co-culture systems of cardiac myocytes (IPSC derived), primary cardiac endothelial and primary cardiac fibroblast cells as well as mouse cardiac myofibroblasts to closely mimic physiological conditions.   

For fibrosis research, we provide a range of assays using diverse stimuli (TGFβ, IL-1β, thrombin) to induce and reverse fibrotic transformation. High-throughput 384-well imaging enables detailed analysis of key markers such as αSMA, collagen (I, V, IV), fibronectin, vimentin, laminin, elastin, and SMAD translocation, alongside cell and nuclear morphology. Additional capabilities include collagen localization and migration scratch assays, as well as transcriptomic profiling.