As science advances it can take a singular focus, this is the case with the development of tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) in the treatment of cancer. While TKIs show promise in cancer treatment they often come with cardiovascular complications that surface during clinical trials. Assistant professor of biomedical engineering Huaxiao “Adam” Yang is developing a process to assess the cardiovascular concerns related to TKIs preclinical trial.

A grant awarded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) will support his research over the next year into creating a new in vitro human model for comprehensively assessing TKI-induced cardiotoxicity. Human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived vascularized cardiac organoids (VCOs) developed in Yang’s and other labs have shown great promise in emulating the human heart in both cardiovascular structure and function, which makes it an ideal in vitro drug toxicity evaluation system targeting cardiovascular cells by TKIs.

With these VCOs there remains challenges to be addressed, and Yang’s lab looks to do that through artificial intelligence-driven biomedical data analysis, classification, and prediction. By phenotyping the cardiovascular structure and function of the VCOs the goal is to establish an organoid-AI system to assess the TKI-induced cardiotoxicity efficiently and accurately. This awarded project is through collaboration with Dr. Yunhe Feng from UNT Computer Science and Engineering, Dr. Lin Xu from School of Public Health University of Texas at Southwestern Medical Center, and Dr. June-Wha Rhee (M.D.) from the Division of Cardiology in City of Hope.