Greenstone lands NIH grant to target incurable heart scarring in Duchenne patients
What's the deal? Greenstone Biosciences has received a Catalyze R61 award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood InstituteDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, part of the National Institutes of HealthDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The grant funds a program to discover drug candidates for myocardial fibrosis and dilated cardiomyopathy in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD).
Why it matters: DMD affects about one in every 3,500 baby boys worldwide, and heart problems are the main cause of death. Corticosteroids can delay heart failure, but more than a quarter of patients cannot tolerate or do not respond to them. No approved therapy directly tackles the heart scarring the disease causes — the gap this program targets.
What's the endgame? The Palo Alto company will use its induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) biobank and cardiomyocyte disease models, combining proteomics, computational drug screening, and generative AI to find and validate candidates.
How it works: The Catalyze program runs in two phases. The current R61 phase funds target identification and early discovery; success would advance the work to an R33 phase covering compound synthesis, testing in vivo, and IND-enabling studies.
“DMD cardiomyopathy has gone unaddressed for too long, in part because the tools to model it faithfully in the lab have not existed,” said Dr. Joseph C. WuDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, co-founder of Greenstone Biosciences and director of the Stanford University Cardiovascular Institute. “This award lets us apply patient-derived cardiomyocyte models and modern computational methods to a disease where the biology has been difficult to reach any other way.”
Why now? The regulatory landscape for New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) is shifting. The US Food and Drug AdministrationDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s 2025 animal-testing roadmap and its April 2026 progress report made the ISTAND program permanent, created a NAMs Acceptability Database, and approved the agency's first AI-based drug development tool for clinical trials.
Congress has also advanced the FDA Modernization Act 3.0, which would align the agency's rules with nonclinical testing authority granted in 2022. The bill passed the House on July 20, 2026, and awaits a final Senate vote.
The signal: Greenstone's platform pairs a large human iPSC biobank — samples from over 2,500 donors — with AI-driven target identification. Federal backing for a rare-disease program built on human-relevant models signals growing institutional confidence in replacing animal testing with patient-derived tools.
Image credit: NIH-NCATS
Read more: AP News
