This Startup Raised $38 Million To Fill One Of The Biggest Gaps In Drug Discovery
Summary
That number has remained largely unchanged since the early 1990s, despite milestone advances in science genomics, automated systems for conducting experiments and artificial intelligence. One big reason: lab research models that cant accurately capture how drugs will behave in an actual person. For example, Vivodyne can grow lung tissue, infect it with a respiratory disease, and then subject it to various treatments, cataloging the results. With reproducibility and extremely tight control thanks to the full robotic automation of the process.Alex Morgan, a partner at Khosla Ventures, says it is precisely this scalability that most excites him about this investment. With the new infusion of capital in this seed round, he told Forbes that Vivodyne will be able to develop more tissue systems for its platform, scale up its automation and build up its base of talent.The overarching goal for his company, Georgescu said, is to turn it into the biological equivalent of a large-scale data center that provides scientists with unprecedented capabilities for researching human disease.