A Bay Area startup is taking a shot at ending animal testing, one of medicine's most persistent humanitarian and logistical problems.
Drugs that appear promising in mice can fall apart once they reach humans, not to mention the suffering the animals endure.
Its solution is a fleet of robotic "hives" that grow human tissue and run millions of experiments designed to catch failures long before people enter costly clinical trials.
Here's what to know
According to Fast Company, Vivodyne operates south of San Francisco and is building an automated system intended to replace animal testing. Instead of making mice the primary proving ground for new medicines, the company uses mini-labs filled with living human tissue and relies on AI-designed experiments.
As Fast Company noted, nearly 90% of clinical trials still fail even after a drug has passed animal testing. That gap suggests animal models often do a poor job of forecasting how human bodies will respond.
The company says it has expanded to 12 robotic labs, which it calls "hives." The setup can support controlled studies on more than 3 million human tissues a year, about twice the combined capacity of all U.S. clinical trials.
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Work in the system begins with human cells, which can be obtained through a simple blood draw. From there, the cells are grown on "biological chips," where they form tissue structures complete with blood vessels and immune cells that resemble parts of organs, including the liver and kidney.
More background
Animal studies have long been a routine checkpoint in drug development, despite their uneven record as a guide to how treatments will perform in people.
A system built around human tissue could help drugmakers answer critical questions much earlier.
Human tissue testing may help better determine if a treatment seems safe, if it affects the target tissue the way researchers expect, and whether there are warning signs that would otherwise surface only after enormous sums have already been spent.
When trials fail late in development, the costs can be staggering, and those setbacks can delay the arrival of better medicines for patients who need them.
There is also an ethical dimension. If human-tissue platforms become more accurate and scalable, they could reduce the need for animals in laboratories while improving the odds that therapies moving forward are actually relevant to human biology.
What's being done?
What sets Vivodyne apart is the effort to do this at industrial volume. Rather than making only a small number of organ-like samples for limited studies, the company is using robotics to produce tissues at scale and run thousands of tightly controlled tests in parallel.
Within that automated workflow, the platform can administer drugs, disable genes, and measure tissue reactions. The result is a broader pool of data than traditional methods typically allow, making it easier to compare outcomes and flag ambiguity before a treatment reaches the clinic.
"You have these clinical trials where there's hundreds of millions of dollars at stake … and then it fails because of some ambiguity that you could not have checked," Vivodyne CEO Andrei Georgescu said.
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