Penn researchers recently announced the opening of the world’s largest human biological data center intended to support drug testing.
Bioengineering professor Dan Dongeun Huh and Andrei Georgescu — who received a Ph.D. at Penn in 2021 — first met while Georgescu was on campus. After realizing their shared interest in drug testing and tissue development, the two began brainstorming ideas to optimize preclinical data collection before human trials.
The bioengineers grow cells in tiny devices “using techniques initially developed for manufacturing computer chips,” Huh explained in an interview.
These devices use organ-on-a-chip technology to automate human tissue culturing, allowing them to repeatedly grow hundreds of human tissues on a single disk.
When new drugs are developed, they are tested on either “a really simplified version of the human body” or on animals, Huh said.
This approach, however, is “fundamentally flawed,” because it differs greatly from “what cells experience in the human body.”
“99% of the drugs entering clinical trials are known to fail,” he said. “It costs close to $1 billion to develop just one successful drug, and drug developers want to be able to pull out drugs that are destined to fail in clinical trials as early in the process as possible.”
With these “more realistic, true-to-life models of human body parts” testing can be streamlined — allowing drug companies to save money.
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Vivodyne’s HIVE laboratories consist of robots that manufacture human tissues, test 10,000 lab-grown cell models at a time, and generate data within one to two weeks. The startup partners with pharmaceutical companies that then determine what drugs and therapeutics are administered.
The company now operates 12 robotic laboratories in San Francisco and Philadelphia that engineer human cell models and perform drug testing.
Other artificial intelligence startups recently launched from Penn include an AI platform that analyzes conversations to identify patterns and an early-stage mortgage company that aims to modernize loan processing.
