Vivodyne launches for drugs tested on lab-grown human organs

Vivodyne has launched with $38 million in seed funding, led by the investment firm Khosla Ventures, to discover and develop drugs by testing them on lab-grown human organs. The Philadelphia-based biotechnology firm was founded by University of Pennsylvania bioengineers Andrei Georgescu and Dan Huh. Vivodyne says it has created more than 20 types of human organs on which it can test drugs, mitigating risk before clinical trials. It uses robotic automation to analyze more than 10,000 human tissues at a time and then trains an artificial intelligence–based model on the resulting data to predict therapeutic efficacy, Vivodyne says.