New York, (Newswire.com) – TARA Biosystems, Inc. a company offering “heart-on-a-chip” tissue models for drug discovery and development applications announced today the launch of Cardiotype.Fo, the best-in-class in vitro system for assessment of cardiac contractility. Contractility of heart muscle tissue is a critically important measure of cardiac function and is used routinely to evaluate the safety of biopharmaceutical drug candidates and the efficacy of  therapies under development for the treatment of cardiomyopathy and heart failure.

TARA Biosystems offers bioanalytical testing services on its proprietary cardiac tissue engineering platform known as Biowire™ II. The Biowire™ II platform promotes the maturation of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derived cardiomyocytes into engineered cardiac tissues that mimic structural, functional, and genetic characteristics of mature human cardiac tissue.  These physiologically-relevant in vitro tissue models enable early cardiac risk assessment of drug discovery candidates and accelerate discovery efforts for novel heart medicines via disease modeling and phenotypic screening capabilities.

Leveraging TARA’s Biowire™ II platform, Cardiotype.Fo is the only in vitro assay on the market that is capable of directly measuring contractile force, rate of contraction and rate of relaxation of engineered human cardiac tissues.  The launch of Cardiotype.Fo follows from successful evaluations of the assay with more than a dozen biopharmaceutical partners to-date.

Biowire™ II was recently recognized by Frost & Sullivan’s 2018 Technology Innovation Award as the leading Heart-On-A-Chip solution in North America.  Frost & Sullivan’s Technology Innovation Award recognizes groundbreaking products with innovative features and functionality that are gaining rapid acceptance in the market.

The TARA team will be showcasing Cardiotype.Fo at Booth #212 at the upcoming 2018 Safety Pharmacology Society (SPS) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC (September 30, 2018 to October 3, 2018).  Please stop by our booth to learn more about Cardiotype.Fo or contact us in advance to schedule a private meeting with our team (BD@tarabiosystems.com).

About TARA Biosystems

TARA Biosystems, Inc. provides predictive, in vitro human cardiac tissue models for use in drug discovery and risk assessment. TARA Biosystems offers a high fidelity solution that is based on human iPSC derived cardiac tissue matured to physiologically relevant adult-like levels and provides direct measures of cardiac functionality, including contractile force. The TARA platform allows pharma to access human cardiac information on therapeutics candidates earlier in the drug development cycle.  For more information, please visit: www.tarabiosystems.com.

Press Contacts:

Donna See

TARA Biosystems, Inc.

917-512-3037

donna@tarabiosystems.com

TARA has received Frost & Sullivan’s 2018 North American Technology Innovation Award for our Biowire™ II platform! This award recognizes companies that develop innovative products with rapid market adoption. In addition, it is part of a broader set of Frost & Sullivan’s Best Practices awards presented to companies that inspire growth in their industries. Our growing team is deeply committed to TARA’s mission of enabling faster, safer, and more reliable development of new medicines for better health and longer life. Thank you, Frost & Sullivan, for recognizing our efforts! See their press release here. 

New York, (Newswire.com) – TARA Biosystems is proud to announce that TARA CEO Dr. Misti Ushio has been recognized by Fast Company as one of the Top 100 Most Creative People in Business today. The annual list honors an influential and inspiring group of leaders from a wide range of industries, who are shaping the future of business in creative ways.

Dr. Ushio is the founding CEO of TARA Biosystems, a fast-rising star in the emerging organ-on-a-chip industry, which is disrupting the lengthy, expensive, and error-prone processes that plague conventional biopharmaceutical drug discovery and development. Today, decisions regarding safety of biopharmaceutical drug candidates remain reliant on the use of animal models that are poor proxies for human biology, potentially leading to costly failures discovered years later after hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and, in some cases, adverse human health outcomes. TARA is poised to transform this paradigm by offering a less costly, faster, and more effective way to predict human response to drug candidates using engineered human heart tissue that mimics the function of human heart tissue as nature designed it.

“I am deeply honored to be named to Fast Company’s Top 100 Most Creative People in Business,” said Dr. Ushio. “I founded TARA with the vision of addressing a big, global issue that affects every one of us: accelerating the pace of developing new medicines that will enable us to live healthier, more productive, longer lives. Each of us, personally, as a family member or member of society knows what it’s like to have someone that we care about suffer from ill health or disease. At TARA, delivering on the promise of safer, more effective drugs, sooner, is everything I’ve trained for as a scientist, entrepreneur and mom – it’s personal and professional – it’s what I strive to do every single day, with purpose and integrity.”

Dr. Ushio has over 20 years of experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry, and early stage life science company building. Previously she was Chief Strategy Officer and Managing Director of Harris & Harris Group, where she worked with, and invested in, life science companies to help them realize their transformational science into commercially successful companies. Earlier in her career, Dr. Ushio held management roles at Merck & Company, where she developed vaccines and biologics products, and Columbia University, where she managed the intellectual property of several scientific and engineering portfolios. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University (B.S., Chemical Engineering), Lehigh University (M.S., Chemical Engineering) and University College London (Ph.D., Biochemical Engineering). She also serves as a Director on the Boards of private and public life science companies.

See Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business

Press Contact:

Donna See

TARA Biosystems, Inc.

917-512-2027

donna@tarabiosystems.com

New York, (Newswire.com) – TARA Biosystems, Inc., a company offering physiologically human relevant “heart-on-a-chip” tissue models for drug discovery and development applications, announced the appointment of Donna See as Chief Business Officer. In this newly created role, Donna will drive the company’s commercial operations, building upon TARA’s strong and growing base of revenue-generating partnerships with leading biopharmaceutical companies. She will also develop strategy and opportunities that leverage TARA’s ongoing investment in the production and analysis of large high-fidelity human-relevant datasets.

TARA Biosystems offers bioanalytical testing services on its human stem cell-derived cardiac tissue platform. The company’s Biowire™ II platform enables the maturation of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derived cardiomyocytes into cardiac tissues that achieve an adult-like phenotype. These physiologically-relevant in vitro models facilitate early cardiac risk assessment of drug discovery candidates and accelerate discovery efforts for novel heart medicines via disease modeling and phenotypic screening capabilities.

“We are thrilled to welcome Donna to TARA. As we enter our next phase of rapid company growth, Donna’s proven leadership abilities, make-it-happen energy, and shared vision will be critical to TARA’s growth and commercial partnering efforts,” said Dr. Misti Ushio, CEO of TARA. “Her extensive network and two decades of experience developing, investing, and operating early-stage ventures will be immediately leveraged as TARA executes, scales, and grows.”

“TARA has developed a first-in-class capability with its Biowire™ II platform, creating ‘heart-on-a-chip’ technology that is uniquely positioned to become the industry standard for high-fidelity human in vitro cardiac tissue biology. There is tremendous potential in the development and application of these data for in silico drug discovery,” said Ms. See. “I am very much looking forward to working with the TARA team and our biopharma partners to fully realize this potential.”

Donna brings demonstrated executive leadership experience in translational science, business development, and operations with an emphasis on early-stage life sciences companies. Donna most recently served as Chief Business Officer of Allied-Bristol Life Sciences, a $110 million therapeutic development fund between Allied Minds and Bristol-Myers Squibb, where she was instrumental in all aspects of sourcing, diligence, deal negotiation, and project management across multiple therapeutic areas, including heart failure, oncology, immune disorders, and fibrosis.

TARA is a Fast Company 2018 World Changing Ideas Award finalist!  The prestigious Fast Company World Changing Ideas Awards honors concepts, designs, business models, products, and companies that inspire, innovate, and solve tough problems that improve personal and global well-being … which is exactly what we’re doing at TARA!   Our growing team is deeply committed to TARA’s mission of enabling faster, safer, and more reliable development of new medicines for better health and longer life.  Thank you Fast Company for recognizing our efforts!  We’ll be appearing in the May issue of Fast Company magazine, hitting newsstands on April 17.

TARA will present a poster at the 57th Annual Society of Toxicology Meeting on March 12. Meet us there to learn about Biowire™ II, our human stem cell-derived “heart-on-a-chip” cardiac tissue platform. (more…)

NEW YORK, (Newswire.com) – TARA Biosystems, Inc., a company offering physiologically relevant “heart-on-a-chip” tissue models for drug discovery and development applications, announced today that it has appointed pharmaceutical industry innovation leader, John M. Baldoni, Ph.D. to its Board of Directors.

TARA Biosystems offers bioanalytical testing services on its human stem cell-derived cardiac tissue platform. The company’s Biowire™ II platform enables early cardiac risk assessment of drug discovery candidates and accelerates discovery efforts for novel heart medicines via its disease modeling and phenotypic screening capabilities. TARA continues to develop a proprietary analytics platform, leveraging data from internal development programs on its Biowire II tissue production platform.

“TARA Biosystems uniquely enables the production of large amounts of high fidelity human relevant data,” said Dr. Baldoni. “This provides foundational information for machine learning and nextgeneration computational approaches that are fundamentally shifting the way drug development is done today.”

Dr. Baldoni has over 37 years of experience of implementing cutting-edge technology to improving the development of new medicines. He is currently Senior Vice President of In silico Drug Discovery, at GSK, which uses computational methods to identify patient needs, explore molecular interventions to address those needs, and design clinical trials to test the medical hypothesis. The intent is to discover medicines at higher velocity and with greater precision compared to current approaches. Dr. Baldoni is also founder and governing board co-chairperson of Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM), which is championing a framework for pioneering applications of deep learning for drug research. ATOM aims to develop computing models that will guide researchers based on a computer’s ability to quickly vet millions of molecules for efficacy and structural relationships and that will adapt as they are applied to new data. Dr. Baldoni was previously Senior Vice President, Platform Technology and Science, at GSK. In that role, he worked across the entire drug discovery and development process.

“TARA’s objective is to greatly improve the drug discovery and development process by providing human in vitro models,” said Misti Ushio, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of TARA. “Dr. Baldoni brings to TARA a visionary perspective on how engineered human cardiac tissue data can be applied to predictive risk assessment and the acceleration of drug discovery.”

Read the full press release here

TARA has been featured in Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas section. The article describes TARA’s technology and the impact it has on the speed and accuracy of drug development, as well as its potential to reduce animal use in the process.

(more…)

TARA will present a poster at Keystone Symposia’s “Heart Failure: Crossing the Translational Divide” conference, on January 15. Meet us there to learn about Biowire™ II, our human stem cell-derived “heart-on-a-chip” cardiac tissue platform. (more…)

NEW YORK, (Newswire.com) –

TARA Biosystems announced today that it closed on a $9 million Series A financing.

TARA offers testing services on its human stem cell-derived cardiac tissue platform. The company’s platform, which is based on its proprietary Biowire™ technology, enables discovery efforts for novel heart medicines via its disease modeling and phenotypic screening capabilities.  TARA can also utilize its precision cardiology efforts to help successfully translate research efforts to the clinic.

Series A Proceeds will Fuel 2018 Product Launch and New Product Development

Proceeds from the $9M Series A financing will fuel the launch of TARA’s first products in 2018 and accelerate the development of TARA’s growing portfolio of healthy cardiac tissues, cardiac disease models as well as a range of acute and chronic testing service products.

The Series A round was co-led by Trancos Ventures and Morgan Noble.  “The team has invested considerable effort digging deep into customer needs and, in parallel on the technical front, has generated a significant dataset, supporting a unique and compelling value proposition for the cardiovascular R&D community,” said Craig Asher, the managing partner for Trancos Ventures. “We’ve been further impressed with TARA’s ability to translate these efforts into early traction with big pharma in cardiac toxicology.” The NYS Innovation Venture Capital Fund administered by Empire State Development joined the round, which also included TARA’s existing investors, Alexandria Venture Investments, the strategic venture capital arm of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE:ARE), 180 Degree Capital Corp. (NASDAQ:TURN; f/k/a Harris & Harris Group, Inc.), Empire State Development’s Innovate NY Fund and the Partnership Fund for New York City.

“TARA is extremely fortunate to be working with this group of highly successful and experienced life science technology investors,” said Misti Ushio, CEO of TARA Biosystems, “This financing will propel the launch of our cardiac analysis solutions based on our Biowire™ technology platform.”

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