Science
Vivodyne builds an AI lab for human-tissue drug tests
Vivodyne’s robotic labs grow human tissues and use AI to run millions of drug experiments, aiming to improve clinical-trial predictions and reduce animal testing.
Around 90% of clinical trials fail even after a drug has passed animal testing. Vivodyne, a startup south of San Francisco, is building a robotic system that grows human tissues and uses AI to run drug experiments designed to predict human outcomes more accurately.
As Fast Company reports, Vivodyne’s system now consists of 12 robotic labs, known as “hives.” Together, they can run controlled trials on more than 3 million human tissues per year—twice the capacity of all clinical trials in the United States combined.
“You have these clinical trials where there’s hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and decades of people’s careers just spent hoping this thing works. And then it fails because of some ambiguity that you could not have checked.”
— Andrei Georgescu, CEO of Vivodyne
The process begins with human cells, often collected through a blood draw. Vivodyne grows them on biological chips, where they self-assemble into living structures containing blood vessels and immune cells. The resulting tissues mimic some functions of organs such as the liver or kidney, although they are closer in size to large biopsies and contain hundreds of thousands of cells rather than forming full organs.
Robots can deliver drugs, dose tissues with cell therapies, deactivate genes and perform complex tests. AI designs experiments, analyzes the results and uses those findings to plan subsequent experiments.
Vivodyne says the platform can test tens of thousands of therapeutic compounds on a specific tissue type, repeat the work across different tissues, and compare diseased tissue with healthy tissue. That could expose both whether a treatment works and whether it causes side effects in human tissue before a drug reaches a clinical trial.
The company’s system is presented as a way to improve drug development and potentially reduce reliance on animal testing. The report does not say that regulators have approved the platform as a replacement for animal studies, or when Vivodyne’s approach might become standard in pharmaceutical development.