← Back to Partners
Humanitas Research Hospital

Humanitas Research Hospital (ICH)

Location: 🇮🇹 Milan, Italy
Website: www.humanitas-research.com
Type: Hospital & Research Center

Partner Identity

Humanitas Research Hospital (ICH) is a specialized hospital and research center, house of Humanitas University, an international university which is devoted to medical science. ICH is a center of excellence for research and treatment of cardiovascular and neurological diseases, cancer, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. It employs about 800 physicians and manages around 11.000 patients per day. More than 500 scientists organized in 38 research groups work at ICH to understand the mechanisms involved in biological processes relevant to human health and diseases. Humanitas provides laboratory space, high-tech infrastructures, computational platforms and support personnel enabling researchers to carry out research with the highest international standards. The results of our research are routinely published in top-tier scientific journals.

Role in PHOENIX

In PHOENIX, Humanitas Research Hospital (ICH) brings advanced translational expertise to support the functional validation of next-generation organ-on-chip technologies, serving as clinical demonstrator of the developed platform. ICH contributes to shaping innovation-oriented use cases by integrating clinical insight with cutting-edge human in vitro models. The hospital plays a key role in validating the μHeart platform through disease-relevant functional assays, focusing on electrical and mechanical performance in a specific form of genetic cardiomyopathies (LMNA-cardiomyopathy) and in diseases with secondary cardiac phenotype (Friederic Ataxia). Finally, ICH supports the demonstration of PHOENIX platforms as innovative tools for molecular studies and drug testing, facilitating pre-clinical research and accelerating the translation of organ-on-chip technologies toward impactful biomedical applications.

Main contributions and activities:

  • Functional validation of innovative cardiac organ-on-chip platforms using LMNA-cardiomyopathy as paradigmatic clinically-relevant disease model
  • Assessment of tissue performance and maturation of developed next-generation organ-on-chip through the integration of advanced electrical and mechanical readouts
  • Support to pre-clincal and translational demonstration of PHOENIX technologies for molecular studies and drug testing

Research Capabilities

PHOENIX Project Team

Elisa Di Pasquale – Research coordination (head of the lab)

Cecilia Thairi – Postdoctoral Fellow

Carlotta Ronchi – Senior postdoc, collaborator

Vittoria Medeghini – Young investigator, collaborator