PHILADELPHIA, PA — Vivodyne has established a network of 12 automated laboratories capable of testing potential medicines on 3.1 million lab-grown human tissues annually, securing paid early access agreements with eight major pharmaceutical companies as it expands artificial intelligence-driven drug development.
The Philadelphia company estimates its annual testing capacity is twice the combined scale of every U.S. clinical trial, positioning its platform as a way for drugmakers to evaluate treatments in human tissue before testing them in patients.
The operation combines robotic HIVE laboratories with Vivodyne’s newly introduced Series 2 TissueDisk, a biological chip that simultaneously grows hundreds of functional human tissues.
Vivodyne manufactures the disks on its own automated production line, allowing the company to scale tissue production and run controlled experiments across multiple diseases and organ systems.
The platform is designed to help pharmaceutical companies assess drug targets, chemical formulations, dosing, safety and potential side effects earlier in development.
Its laboratories operate without human intervention for weeks, growing tissues to maturity, administering drug combinations and cell therapies, modifying genes and collecting biological data over time.
Vivodyne’s Hivemind software plans experiments, directs laboratory operations, trains AI models on the results and identifies which experiments to conduct next.
The company’s approach uses reinforcement learning, allowing AI systems to propose interventions, observe how living tissues respond and refine subsequent experiments based on measured outcomes.
Experimental results are collected through three-dimensional imaging, genetic sequencing and protein analysis, producing data on how treatments affect cells, blood vessels, immune components and molecular pathways.
Vivodyne grows more than 20 types of human organ tissue, including liver, lung, intestinal, bone marrow, pancreatic, kidney, eye and lymph node tissue.
Its disease models include fibrosis, solid tumors, inflammation, metabolic disorders and vascular disease.
Each tissue sample begins with primary cells from human patients and develops into a structure containing approximately 200,000 to 500,000 cells, including blood vessels and immune components.
Test compounds are delivered through those vascular networks, replicating the way medicines circulate through the bloodstream.
In comparisons involving healthy and diseased patients, Vivodyne reported that its laboratory-grown airway tissue achieved a 96% concordance with the cellular composition of human airway tissue.
The company’s pharmaceutical programs include pulmonary tumors, multi-target biologics, cell therapies, immunosuppression, fibrosis, inflammatory diseases, messenger RNA, lipid nanoparticles, chemotherapy, antibody-drug conjugates, vaccines and drug-induced liver injuries.
Some pharmaceutical partners have reserved large-scale experimental capacity, while others are collaborating with Vivodyne on drug-discovery programs.
“Prediction means knowing what happens when you try something new,” stated Tony Bahinski, Vivodyne’s chief biotechnology officer and a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s science board. “And in pharma, almost everything we try is new.”
Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Andrei Georgescu argued that conventional testing methods and existing biological datasets are insufficient to train AI systems capable of predicting complex human responses.
“To create AI that understands our intricate human biology, we need to continuously generate and train on huge amounts of human data, and we can’t get that by risking people,” Georgescu stated.
Vivodyne is working to expand tissue production beyond its current capacity toward billions of samples as it develops computational models spanning multiple human organ systems.
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