Penn spinout that replicates human tissue for drug testing raises $40 million investment
The investment comes as the FDA is pushing drug developers to phase out animal testing in some of the biologic treatments that have to go through its approval process.
Vivodyne, a Penn spinout that creates human tissue to replace animal testing in drug development, has raised $40 million in a second round of venture capital investment.
The company, headquartered in Philadelphia’s Curtis building in Center City, aims to speed up drug discovery and development, while eliminating the financial risk involved in testing treatments in mice that often don’t work in humans.
“Nineteen out of 20 drugs that are taken all the way to clinic, with the very strong belief that they’re going to work in people, will fail,” Andrei Georgescu, Vivodyne’s cofounder and CEO said in an interview last week, when the funding was announced. “And that’s simply because we’ve fine-tuned those drugs on animals and not on human physiology.”
Vivodyne’s method for creating tissue, such as bone marrow, lymph nodes, and liver, can capture human complexity and allow testing at a massive scale, Georgescu said. This means the company is “testing on human tissue to make drugs for humans, as opposed to testing on mice to make drugs that work in mice,” he said.
The replicas of human tissue that Vivodyne creates from donated human cells are about an inch long and have the same structure and function as in humans, Georgescu said.
Vivodyne’s financial deal follows an April announcement that the Food and Drug Administration plans to reduce animal testing.
Growing in Philadelphia and on the West Coast
The five-year old company grew out of bioengineering professor Dan Huh’s laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, where Georgescu earned a doctorate in 2021.
Vivodyne had previously raised $38 million from investors and recently tripled its capacity for testing human tissue at its lab space in the Curtis Center, Georgescu said. The company has about 40 employees, including around 25 in Philadelphia, he said.
The new investment, led by Khosla Ventures, will help pay for a 23,000-square-foot fully robotic laboratory at Genesis Marina in Brisbane, Calif., near San Francisco, where the company will manufacture 20 types of human tissue, the company said.
Khosla Ventures, best known for early investments in companies like DoorDash and OpenAI, participated in Vivodyne’s earlier investment rounds. New investors are Lingotto Investment Management, Helena Capital, Fortius Ventures, and existing investors Kairos Ventures, CS Ventures, Bison Ventures, and MBX Capital.
Despite the California expansionproject, Georgescu said Vivodyne remains anchored in Philadelphia.
“The move out here to the West Coast was to be able to engage with the kind of R&D and biotech ecosystems out here in San Francisco, as well as the large pharmas that also have offices out here in some of their other development programs,” he said.