Label-free optical sensing for cardiac organoid development

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Robert David; Professor Dr. Friedemann Reinhard
• Subject Area: Cardiology, Angiology ; Medical Physics, Biomedical Technology
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 572594361

An organoid model of the heart is a long-standing goal of cardiovascular medicine and biology. It would obviate animal trials and provide a scalable testbed for drug screening. Realizing such a system has proven difficult, among other reasons because terminally differentiated cardiomyocytes do not proliferate and because a realistic model of heart tissue has to involve multiple subtypes (atrial, ventricular and pacemaker) of cells. Our project aims to develop such an organoid system by controlled differentiation and maturation of induced pluripotent stem cells, and by assembling them with fibroblasts and endothelial cells into three-dimensional tissue. Since invasive diagnostics cannot be implemented deep inside such an organoid, this work will be supported by the development of label-free non-invasive methods to characterize the type and function of cells inside tissue. These methods will be based on imaging of nanometer- scale micromotion by interferometric microscopy, combined with advanced image processing.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Christian Rimmbach