TARA Biosystems, a company generating in vitro human biology to increase the success of cardiac disease drug discovery and development, today announced a $10 million Series A2 financing. This financing will be used to scale TARA's cardiac tissue engineering platform technology and advance its drug discovery programs.

New investors included OMX Ventures, Merieux Equity Partners, and LifeForce Capital. Current investors of TARA, including Alexandria Venture Investments, Partnership Fund for New York City, Trancos Ventures, DEFTA Partners, New York Ventures and Tachyon Ventures, also participated in the Series A2 round.

"We are excited to join TARA during this time of rapid growth and expansion of their cardiac disease drug discovery engine," said Daniel Fero, Ph.D., Managing Director of OMX Ventures, who joined TARA's Board of Directors in connection with the round. "This new funding will allow TARA to expand its infrastructure needs to accelerate a portfolio of novel cardiac disease drug candidates."

Founded in 2014, TARA develops in vitro biology with a focus on translational cardiac tissue models. TARA's induced pluripotent stem cell derived human cardiac tissue is a versatile drug discovery and development model that enables researchers to evaluate both drug safety and efficacy endpoints in vitro to quickly generate highly translatable data in a preclinical setting. The platform allows for broad-based phenotypic analysis of healthy, gene-edited, patient-derived, and drug-induced models of human cardiac disease at scale and captures robust physiologic endpoint measurements including contractility, electrophysiology, calcium signaling, structure, as well as genomic, proteomic, and metabolic profiles.

"Cardiac disease drug discovery and development efforts have historically been extremely challenging due to a lack of predictive human biology models," said Misti Ushio, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of TARA. "Our company has the ability to develop and interrogate human cardiac tissue models for specific patient populations. The Series A2 funding allows us to expand our pharma partnerships to rapidly advance the discovery of new medicines for cardiac disease."

About TARA Biosystems

Headquartered in New York City, TARA Biosystems harnesses innovations in stem cell biology and tissue engineering to generate in vitro biology that recapitulates human physiology with unprecedented fidelity. Our highly versatile and robust platform captures integrated physiologic endpoints of human cardiac function across a wide repertoire of cardiac disease phenotypes. Our data facilitates decisive evaluation of the efficacy and risk of novel medicines, increasing the probability of success and decreasing long timeframes associated with traditional drug discovery efforts. Safer and more effective new medicines that rapidly make it to market means better health and longer lives, and we believe that benefits people everywhere.

For more information, please visit www.tarabiosystems.com.