It’s been pretty clear for some time that there’s a big need to improve the efficiency of drug R&D. By industry’s count, drugs cost over $1 billion to develop, and most of them fail. A big reason why is the preclinical studies in petri dishes and animals don’t accurately predict how a drug will behave in humans.

That problem has prompted a slew of companies to innovate new ways to test drugs in a more human-representative fashion, and perhaps even change how preclinical testing is done. The latest to come along is Tara Biosystems, a New York-based Columbia University spinout whose founders say they’ve found a novel, stem-cell based approach that can simulate how a human heart would react to a drug.

Tara recently started up with the help of seed funding from New York-based Harris & Harris Group (NASDAQ: TINY), a publicly-traded venture firm that invests in early-stage companies. Misti Ushio, a managing director and executive VP of Harris & Harris, is leading the company, which is being incubated within the firm.

Regulatory filings show that Harris & Harris has invested around $300,000 in Tara. Ushio says the seed funding gives the company about a year’s worth of runway to prove itself—to validate its technology, convince pharmaceutical companies of its worth, and essentially earn an additional investment, like a full-fledged Series A round.

Tara is based on the work of two researchers: Columbia professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic and University of Toronto professor Milica Radisic. They met several years ago at Bob Langer’s lab at MIT and have since worked together to turn stem cells into mature heart tissue that can be tested as if it were an adult heart.

At the core of Tara’s technology are what the founders call “biowire.” Two parallel polymer wires are attached to the wells of a 96-well microplate (pictured above), a common piece of research equipment; the wells function as small test tubes.

The idea is that a researcher would put stem cells into the wells, and then mature them with the help of electrical stimulation. The stem cells grab on to the polymer wires and grow across them as they mature, eventually forming what amounts to tiny micro-hearts, with all of the different cell types that constitute adult heart tissue. Those tiny hearts beat, and pull on the wires when they do. The wires allow for tension, which is important, because by measuring how those wires move, a researcher could determine how the heart contracts, and what, specifically, is causing it to contract in the way it does.