Philadelphia-based Vivodyne announced last week that it had closed on $38 million in seed funding to further its discovery pipeline and clinically predictive AI platform.
The seed funding, led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Kairos Ventures, CS Ventures MBX Capital and Bison Ventures, will allow Vivodyne to identify novel therapeutic targets and predict responses to new drugs by testing them on lab-grown human organ tissue. Vivodyne has already bioengineered more than 20 types of human organ tissues that mimic human physiology as a way of capturing the effects of new therapies. The testing on lab-grown organs allows the company to predict patient outcomes at the cellular, tissue, organ and systemic level.
“By combining the principles of organoids and organs-on-chips, we’ve created a new class of lifelike, lab-grown human organs. We use these lab-grown human test subjects to discover and develop new therapies for human diseases,” said Andrei Georgescu, CEO and Co-Founder of Vivodyne. “The result is huge amounts of complex human data—larger than you could get from any clinical trial—and we train multimodal models on this data to predict and improve the safety and efficacy of new drugs. This breakthrough not only enhances the predictive accuracy of AI in drug development, but also promises to significantly improve the success rates of AI-generated drugs, setting a new standard in the field.”
Officials said a bottleneck in drug development is the inability to gather realistic, scalable and reproducible human-predictive data. Vivodyne’s process for drug discovery produces human results before the drug is ever used in clinical trials. By using robotic automation, the company can cultivate, dose, and analyze more than 10,000 individual human tissues at a time. This process, officials said, creates vast human datasets that power human-trained AI for drug discovery.
“By testing drugs and life-saving biologics directly on these realistic human tissues at an unprecedented scale and resolution, we can improve the success rates of therapeutics entering clinical trials,” said Alex Morgan, Partner at Khosla Ventures. “Vivodyne’s technology bridges the gap between preclinical R&D and human clinical trials, while automating every step of the testing pipeline, from growing tissues, dosing, sampling and imaging, to analyzing data. The ability to screen and develop new potential lifesaving therapies, testing thousands at a time on functionally realistic human tissues on Vivodyne’s automated platform, is a major step forward for the pharmaceutical industry.”