CytoHub Co-Founder Aitor Aguirre Named to Lead Cardiac Tissue Engineering at NIH's First National Organoid Center

Dr. Aguirre will direct the Tissue Engineering Laboratories at NIH's $87 million Standardized Organoid Modeling Center at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, bringing the human heart assembloid science he pioneered, and that CytoHub has licensed for commercial use, to a national research resource

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CytoHub Inc., a biotechnology company utilizing the CardioVive AI-integrated human heart assembloid platform for drug safety and efficacy prediction, today announced that Scientific Co-Founder Aitor Aguirre, PhD, has been appointed to key leadership roles at the National Institutes of Health’s newly established Standardized Organoid Modeling (SOM) Center in Frederick, Maryland.

Dr. Aguirre will serve as Director of the Tissue Engineering Laboratories at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR) and Director of Cardiac Tissue Engineering at the SOM Center. In these roles, he will oversee organoid, stem cell, and laboratory automation programs, as well as lead cardiac tissue engineering efforts to deliver reproducible human heart models to academic, industrial, and government researchers.

The SOM Center represents the NIH’s first national resource dedicated to standardized, organoid-based New Approach Methodologies (NAMs); human-relevant models prioritized by the FDA as it transitions away from preclinical animal testing. Backed by $87 million in contracts over its first three years, the SOM Center is supported by the National Cancer Institute and developed in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

“Aitor pioneered the human heart organoid and assembloid models that form the foundation of CytoHub’s novel CardioVive platform. He will now help shape the national standard for heart tissue engineering” said Rajib Biswas, PhD, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of CytoHub. “Our CardioVive tissue is beating human heart with matured physiology. Every experiment we run generates training data for our integrated CytoHub.AI platform, enabling prediction of whether a compound will be toxic to the heart, trigger an arrhythmia, or change how it contracts. We're proud of Aitor, and we're excited about what a standardized national organoid infrastructure means for the field. As the FDA moves away from animal testing, pharma needs human heart data it can trust, and a national standard for how that tissue is built makes every dataset trained on it more valuable.”

A Career Built on Firsts in Heart Organoid Science

Dr. Aguirre joins NIH from Michigan State University, where he was Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chief of the Division of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology at the Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering (IQ), and Director of the university's Stem Cell Core. Over the past decade, with support from the NIH and the American Heart Association, his laboratory delivered a string of firsts in heart organoid science:

• Created the first self-assembling human heart organoids capable of modeling early cardiac development and congenital heart disease (Nature Communications, 2021).
• Developed the first patterned human primitive heart organoid model generated through pluripotent stem-cell self-organization (Nature Communications, 2023).
• Engineered the first human heart organoid model of atrial fibrillation by integrating immune cells into the tissue, opening a new discovery path for a condition affecting an estimated 60 million people worldwide, with no new A-fib drug class in over 30 years (Cell Stem Cell, 2025).
• Built a body of peer-reviewed work recognized by the NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) as “a big win for cardiac research,” and cited thousands of times across the field.

This work is the scientific foundation of CytoHub’s human heart platform. The company has licensed Dr. Aguirre's heart assembloid technology from Michigan State University and built it into CardioVive: beating human heart tissue containing 96 percent of the heart's native cell types, exhibiting matured electrophysiology and manufactured at scale, including in 3D bioreactors. Every experiment run on that tissue (imaging, flow cytometry, sequencing, electrophysiology) becomes training data for CytoHub.AI, the company's integrated AI platform that predicts cardiotoxicity, arrhythmia, and contractility for each compound tested. Together, CardioVive and CytoHub.AI have delivered programs, with others in progress, for pharmaceutical and biotech partners including Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, and Ventyx Biosciences (now part of Eli Lilly). CytoHub holds eight patents covering its differentiation methods, media, manufacturing process, and AI/ML, and is backed by J&J JLABS, NVIDIA Inception, AWS, MSU Research Foundation, Red Cedar Ventures, the AHA, the NIH, and the National Science Foundation.

“The goal has always been to make growing living human heart tissue as routine as any other lab process,” said Dr. Aguirre. “At the SOM Center, I can pursue that at national scale, while CytoHub carries the same science into the AI models pharma uses today and the regenerative therapies we're building for tomorrow. The field advances on both fronts.”

Dr. Aguirre remains a co-founder of CytoHub and will continue to advise the company across its platform: CardioVive human heart tissue, the CytoHub.AI cardiac prediction models trained on it, and HeartReady, the regenerative cell therapy for heart failure built from the same cells.

About CytoHub Inc.

CytoHub Inc. is a San Diego-based biotechnology company building AI for the heart: living human heart tissue and the AI trained on it to pick winning drugs. Built on the human heart assembloid technology of co-founder Dr. Aitor Aguirre, CytoHub grows beating, adult-grade human heart tissue (CardioVive), captures every beat as data, and trains AI on it (CytoHub.AI) to predict cardiotoxicity, arrhythmia, and contractility before a drug reaches the clinic. The same cells underpin HeartReady, the company's regenerative cell therapy program for heart failure. CytoHub holds eight patents and works with pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners including Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, and Ventyx Biosciences (Eli Lilly). It is backed by J&J JLABS, NVIDIA Inception, AWS, the NIH, the American Heart Association, and the NSF. Learn more at www.cytohub.com.