Vivodyne grows human tissues at scale to replace animal drug testing — and is already working with top-10 pharma

Speaker 2: Our next guest is the real liver king, not the social media influencer, but the CEO of the world's largest human biological data center. Fascinating story. Andrei from Vivodyne. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Speaker 7: Doing well. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2: Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a little bit.

Speaker 7: Sure. So, VivaDyne grows human tissues at very massive scale. Okay. So we can test drugs, in humans without testing in people.

Speaker 10: Okay.

Speaker 7: And we do it at very massive scale. So many times the total amount of clinical trials run-in The US every year. And the reason for doing all this is the failure rate of drugs is huge. Yeah. So nineteen out of twenty drugs fail because all the animal experiments we've done just don't translate to people. So we can cure cancer and Alzheimer's and all these things in mice and then they fell in people.

Speaker 1: Maybe When did humans first grow human tissue in a lab? Yeah.

Speaker 7: This is this is the first time we're able to grow like large pieces of human tissue. So hundreds of thousands of cells in each individual piece. Mhmm. And we're growing, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of these tissues at a time to test all sorts of different drugs and permutations. So it's

Speaker 1: a hundreds of thousands of cells. This is still microscopic or

Speaker 7: Oh, you can see them. Yeah. You can see the little blood vessels growing in them. It's like inch scale, centimeter scale.

Speaker 2: Interesting. What we have Have ever

Speaker 1: had a rogue tissue?

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 7: Yeah. I I am the first rogue tissue. I crawled out of this guy back

Speaker 2: here. Oh, no. You know, here I am. Well, yeah. What what what is the key unlock that allows this? Because I imagine that fifty years ago, there were scientists that were like, it sure would be nice to have a ton of human tissue to test drugs on. They couldn't do it then. Why is it possible now?

Speaker 7: So one of the things that made it possible is having the throughput to test all the different formulations for like the medias and the protocols that we use to grow them. Yeah. Which the robotics, know, by by kind of dog sitting around technology, we're also get better at.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 7: So it's you know, with with with biology, it's like climbing a big mountain with a with a little valley at the top. Right? It's the the the kind of skill is like getting the ball up and having it just kind of nest there. And that is when it kind of falls into what it would naturally do. Mhmm. So gains the function it would normally have. We can we can dose to these blood vessels that self assemble, and this tissue actually performs the function of its, you know, native organ counterpart.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Is are are humans like sourdough? Like, you need a little starter? You know? Like, how do you actually kick start your tissue?

Speaker 7: Yeah. So we use that's a very good analogy. So we use primary human cells. We get them from like donated blood or biopsies of things like tumors, and we get the primary cells out of there. We're not using, you know, like transformed stem cells or the old cell lines. They are primary human cells, and they are what kind of seed this process of the tissue cell.

Speaker 2: Yes. So someone has a tumor, they do a biopsy, and then instead of just saying, okay, you can test one drug on it because if you kill this, you're done. You can scale it up and and clone it effectively, and then you can say, let's test 50 drugs on this and see what actually works.

Speaker 7: Yeah. 50,000.

Speaker 2: 50,000.

Speaker 7: The search space is just so big. Right? I mean, the the the the kind of real problem I think drug development is butting up against is, you know, over the past decades, we've tried to find like single target cures, right, for disease. So like maybe this receptor or maybe this compound in the blood by reducing it or by increasing it, we can we can fix some disease. But things like cancer and fibrosis and Alzheimer's and all of these just like keep getting away from us, right? So we might get a little bit close and then, oh, does nothing in people. And imagine like if the, you know, the check engine light comes on in your car, the solution is not gonna be you turn a single screw. It's like a little more complicated than that. And so the hard part about drugging multiple targets and interfacing with biology, like at the complexity that it has, is how how do you search that space? How do you know which things to bind and and and how it

Speaker 2: all

Speaker 7: works? And to to really address such a large shared space, you can no longer just be screening. It just runs away from me, right? It's like a cliff of like numerical climb.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: And so you have to do the inverse, so just understand biology and back solve the things that you should drug to make it do the things you want instead of trying to drug everything and seeing what happens. And so to understand biology at that level, especially human biology, we have to be able to test it.

Speaker 2: We read a story about the price of monkeys spiking based on demand from biotech companies to test drugs on monkeys. Where does this technology fit in the new drug development process? Because I it feels like we're very close to, like, the computers being really good at testing a bunch of ideas. But then, of course, you go what was it? Mouse or monkey or something at some point?

Speaker 7: Mouse or Right? Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And but this feels like an interim step that could be before mouse models, or would this be a full replacement for mouse models, or would this be after a mouse model? Like, where does this fit into the to the story arc of a new biotech company?

Speaker 7: So, you know, we we're we're we're currently working with, like, the very large majority of the top 10 pharma, and the majority of the projects that we're working on are things that do not translate from monkeys into people.

Speaker 2: Oh, okay.

Speaker 7: So even the primates are are not giving the same responses that humans are.

Speaker 2: Interesting.

Speaker 7: Or strange things are are being seen in the primates that were not seen in in in the mice and dogs, and you wonder like, which one is it? Right? Sure. And so the the instead of just jumping we have some cells in a dish here. We have some inorganic acid here. Now we're in mice and then woodchucks and a sort of we just need to test on human tissue from the get go and replace this whole outdated approach to maybe the mouse is going to tell us. Because all these drugs that are failing in clinic, right, these 19 out of 20, they are working in the animals. They're safe. They're pretty efficacious. So it's like, fuck, where are our cures? Instead of instead of all these cures, domestic abuse. And so we we we are working from discovery all the way through to, like, supporting clinical trials with these tissues, both to do things that you cannot search easily enough in people and also things that might be too unsafe to search in people.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Jordan, you have another? Or

Speaker 1: What were you doing before this? How'd you get into growing human tissue?

Speaker 2: Doing it for fun, Yeah. Hobbyist.

Speaker 7: Yeah. How'd you get into this? So my my my my background was in designing high throughput microfluidics.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 7: And then I met my co founder Dan as my PhD advisor, and he had invented this concept of the organic chip of of growing, you know, these functional units of human tissues. And we kinda came together and said we need to scale this up dramatically and also improve like the fidelity of these tissues and make them basically indistinguishable from what we'd get in a deep biopsy punch.

Speaker 1: Interesting. What what is like, what are the regulatory guardrails for creating, like like, I I I just imagine, like, you kind of, if your company continues to gain traction

Speaker 2: You're worried about accidentally creating like a Frankenstein type of

Speaker 1: Well, yeah. Like I feel like that's the natural path here. Yeah. And I'm just wondering like there's a lot of like moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding that. There will probably need to be regulations surrounding that at some point. And, yeah, it just feels like that's probably the end state is just vats of of people living in this. People. Anyways, I I've movie guy, but the it's it's the Matrix. Right? Where they're all

Speaker 2: You're real pretty far away from the Matrix

Speaker 1: doesn't feel that far.

Speaker 7: I see the Okay.

Speaker 1: I see the robotic arm in the background.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, real movie is The Island. Yeah. With Michael Bay's The Island, they they they clone a human

Speaker 7: That's and then

Speaker 2: the rich person can be like, oh, I need a kidney transplant. And they're like, well, we got a direct clone of you over there on that island. Let's go get that liver out of them. It's very very dystopian.

Speaker 1: But can I ask you to the We

Speaker 7: can do this hopefully without the the full person?

Speaker 2: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Speaker 7: The FDA, you know, like the the FDA is actually I I think among all of these cases where there's a new technology and you are, like, fighting with the regulator to to push something forward, the FDA has been you know, has has put up now, like, three modernization acts that drive the uptake of these animal alternatives. Right, like given the failure rate. And it really gets worse with biologics, right, like antibody based therapies and, you know, bispecific antibody drug conjugates and all these new modalities for drugs that are that are good because they're specific, but they're specific to human, you know, targets.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 7: And so it's even harder to test those. And so the FDA has been an extremely strong tailwind actually in in making these.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And then and then at some point, like, would, you know, would would you grow a specific individual's tissue and then test a wide range of drugs on that to figure out what was gonna be most effective? Like, that also feels like the next logical step is Yeah. Personalized medicine? Personalized medicine. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Sign, yeah. Take take That is what we're doing. Or something. Okay.

Speaker 7: Yeah. So so so so by definition, these cells have to come from someone, right? And so, you know, we we are usually kind of broad across the different demographics that we test on both, you know, age, sex, race, and so on. But ultimately too for various patient specific diseases. Cancer, right, is a great example. I mean, just imagine being able to if you have a solid tumor, I mean, Island is like the perfect movie. Right? You imagine like 50,000 clones of yourself and you say, alright, like, Survive.

Speaker 2: There's a lot of more You can explain it to the movie though. Gotta actually watch the movie, I think. You're gonna get into some hot water.

Speaker 7: Pick up the good parts. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just the tissue in a in a tea Petri dish. I think most people get behind that.

Speaker 7: But No brain.

Speaker 2: As soon as it's Scarlett Johansson walking around with emotions and ideas and history, it gets a lot darker.

Speaker 1: Most fascinating company we've had on the show this year, I think.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Very interesting.

Speaker 7: Well, congrats I appreciate it, guys.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker 7: Hey, if you wanna grow copies of yourself.

Speaker 2: No. When we hired Tyler, I made sure I was a perfect match on blood type and everything. Yeah. So I'm I'm pretty much good to go. But this sounds good for for those who don't have a title.