What You Should Know:
– Vivodyne, a company pioneering an exclusively human-focused preclinical process, today announced it has raised $40M in new Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from new investors Lingotto Investment Management, Helena Capital, Fortius Ventures, and existing investors Kairos Ventures, CS Ventures, Bison Ventures, and MBX Capital.
– Vivodyne is fundamentally changing how therapies are tested before human clinical trials by using a sophisticated robotics and AI approach on thousands of lab-grown, fully-functional human tissues. This method aims to significantly improve the historically low success rates of drugs transitioning from animal models to human trials.
Overcoming the Preclinical “Valley of Death” with Human-Centric Testing
A staggering near 95% of therapies that show promise in animal models during preclinical testing ultimately fail in human clinical trials. This high failure rate highlights a critical flaw in traditional drug development: therapies are optimized for animal biology without human-specific refinement. Vivodyne’s platform directly addresses this by allowing the same refinement process but on complex human tissues, aiming to produce “people-ready” drug candidates for the first time.
“Vivodyne is fundamentally changing how drugs move from the lab bench to human trials,” said Andrei Georgescu, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Vivodyne. “A model that is only predictive 5% of the time isn’t a model. We’re redefining success in drug discovery by overcoming the limitations that have stalled scientific progress for decades”. He further added, “Pharma has waited decades for scalable human data before clinical trials. We’re now generating data from tens of thousands of complex human tissues, capturing immune responses and disease states that were previously inaccessible. This unprecedented scale and resolution unlock entirely new avenues for drug development”.
Robotics and AI Powering Unprecedented Scale in Human Tissue Analysis
Vivodyne’s technology enables large-scale testing on lab-grown human tissues that can recapitulate the complexity of human disease, leading to more accurate and predictive results than animal models. The company produces human multi-omic data, including imaging, single-cell transcriptomics, and proteomics from more than 10,000 independent human-tissue experiments per robotic run. These lab-grown tissues are notably a thousand times larger than typical organoids, allowing for detailed, functional analyses of human drug responses.
The platform’s fully automated robotic workflow ensures reproducibility at an AI-scale throughput, reportedly generating more reliable, human-relevant data annually than all U.S. clinical trials combined.
Fueling Expansion to Meet Surging Demand for Human-Relevant Data
The new $40M financing will enable Vivodyne to scale its robotics and AI approach significantly. A key part of this expansion includes opening a new 23,000-square-foot fully robotic laboratory at Genesis Marina in South San Francisco. This facility will substantially increase Vivodyne’s preclinical human testing capacity, catering to the surging demand from global pharmaceutical clients. This demand has been further spurred by recent commitments from the FDA and NIH to move away from less-predictive animal models in drug development.
