{"id":592769,"date":"2026-08-14T06:24:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T06:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/592769\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T06:24:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T06:24:10","slug":"the-worlds-largest-biological-datacenter-could-help-make-animal-testing-obsolete-fast-company-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/592769\/","title":{"rendered":"The world\u2019s largest \u2018biological datacenter\u2019 could help make animal testing obsolete – Fast Company Middle East"},"content":{"rendered":"

For decades, the industry has relied on animal testing. But in a laboratory south of San Francisco, a startup called\u00a0Vivodyne<\/a>\u00a0is scaling up a different approach. Inside wardrobe-size mini labs, robots grow human tissue and run thousands of\u00a0AI<\/a>-designed experiments that could better predict how well a new drug will work\u2014and whether it will be safe.<\/p>\n

Right now, around 90% of\u00a0clinical trials<\/a>\u00a0fail despite the fact that a drug has already successfully gone through animal testing. \u201cYou have these clinical trials where there\u2019s hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and decades of people\u2019s careers just spent hoping this thing works,\u201d says Andrei Georgescu, Vivodyne\u2019s CEO. \u201cAnd then it fails because of some ambiguity that you could not have checked.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s system, which now includes a dozen robotic labs called \u201chives,\u201d can run controlled trials on more than 3 million human tissues each year. That\u2019s twice the capacity of all the clinical trials in the U.S. combined.<\/p>\n

The process starts with cells from humans, often taken from a blood draw. In its labs, the cells grow on \u201cbiological chips<\/a>\u201d and self-assemble into living structures with blood vessels and immune cells that reproduce some of the functions of the original organ, whether that\u2019s a liver or a kidney. (The tissues don\u2019t look like full-size organs, but like large biopsies, with hundreds of thousands of cells.)<\/p>\n

\"\"[Image: Vivodyne]<\/p>\n

The automated system can deliver drugs to the tissues, dose with cell therapies, knock out genes, and run complex tests and analysis. AI can design experiments and then use the results to continually design new experiments and improve.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can dose with tens and tens of thousands of therapeutic compounds to understand what they would do in that particular tissue type within a person, and we can repeat this across many types of tissue,\u201d Georgescu says. \u201cWe can look at diseased tissue and see if it becomes healthy. We can look at healthy tissue and see if there are side effects from these drugs.\u201d At a more fundamental level, it\u2019s possible to begin to understand the human body in a way that wasn\u2019t possible before, because experiments in humans have inherently been limited.<\/p>\n

Other startups also use human tissues for testing, but Vivodyne\u2019s platform can be up to 1,000 times larger, making it possible to capture more of the complexity of human biology. In addition, the company can run a massive number of experiments in parallel and feed the data back into AI to repeatedly design new experiments.<\/p>\n

Already, the company is working with many of the largest drug companies. Though Georgescu couldn\u2019t share specific details, he says that the technology has already stopped the development of some drugs that would have been unsafe. Vivodyne has also helped pharmaceutical companies select targets for new drugs and optimize delivery vehicles.<\/p>\n

A clinical trial might test one drug in thousands of people. Vivodyne can test thousands of different drugs across human tissues at once. And while people in a drug trial only have occasional visits to a clinic to track results, the system can continually test how human tissue responds.<\/p>\n

The process is also faster than running animal tests. If a drug company is trying to discover a new target for a disease, for example, it might use genetically modified mice. But just waiting to get the modified mice can take a year and a half, and then there\u2019s the actual testing. \u201cBy that time, we\u2019ve done 25 cycles of our own tests,\u201d Georgescu says.<\/p>\n

For nearly a century, U.S. law required animal testing before human clinical trials in drug development; that changed in 2022 with the\u00a0FDA Modernization Act<\/a>. In the short term, Georgescu says, animal testing will continue in parallel. But it likely won\u2019t be long before it\u2019s a thing of the past. \u201cThe failure rate is so high from animals, I think any alternative is going to very quickly dominate,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For decades, the industry has relied on animal testing. But in a laboratory south of San Francisco, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":592770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[103,61,60],"class_list":["post-592769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/592770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}