Figure 1. HT in drug discovery and cardiotoxicity testing.
In the ‘funnel' workflow of drug development/drug testing, only some assays are HT-compatible. For cellular cardiac electrophysiology, currently there are no assays that fall into that category. The presented all-optical dynamic cardiac electrophysiology framework (OptoDyCE) is applicable to various experimental models (cells, tissue, whole heart and live animal testing) but only some of these (cardiomyocytes and some engineered syncytia, preferably using human iPS-CMs) are scalable and HT-compatible. Furthermore, they are the only ones that can be used directly for personalized testing/therapy on the same patient. Thick red arrows indicate that the OptoDyCE technology can elevate such functional cellular/multicellular cardiomyocyte assays for drug discovery or cardiotoxicity testing to HT-status. Further discussion of the best utility for different experimental models is provided in Supplementary Note 1.