Fresh off $598M deal with Novo Nordisk, a Japanese stem cell company is on its way to the clinic with a different approach to treating heart failure

A common approach to treating heart failure with induced pluripotent stem cells involves grafting sheets of cells onto the surface of the heart to improve vascularization and blood flow. It’s the easiest method of transplantation — but you run the risk of not making an electrical connection with the heart and the cells not synchronizing with the patient’s heart muscle.

So what if you could inject spherical clusters of heart cells directly into the heart muscle wall? For Heartseed, that’s now the $37 million question.