Can you grow a beating heart in a lab? Could you test cardiac drugs on it? Could you transplant it into a human? This week, James is joined by Dr. Kevin Costa, Co-founder & Chief Scientific Officer at biotech firm Novoheart, the first company in the world to have developed miniature beating human hearts from stem cells which are being used to change the way drugs are able to be screened for cardiac effects. The company itself has worked on a multi-phase research partnership with Pfizer and has filed IP on its proprietary system which can create healthy as well as sick mini hearts and combines organoid data with AI to screen for drug toxicity and efficacy with an exceptionally high degree of accuracy. As well as his work with Novoheart, Dr. Costa is also the Associate Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.