AI isn’t close to curing cancer. This startup says it knows what it will take.
A biotech startup called Vivodyne says the AI drug-discovery industry has a data problem, and that it has built a machine to fix it. HIVE, modular robotic labs built by the company, can grow 20 kinds of human tissue, then autonomously dose and monitor them, generating the kind of causal biological data that today’s AI models are missing — data that today mostly comes from animal testing, or studies of single cells or proteins, not living tissue.
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Key Facts
- Fact 1: HIVE, modular robotic labs built by the company, can grow 20 kinds of human tissue, then autonomously dose and monitor them, generating the kind of causal biological data that today’s AI models are missing — data that today mostly comes from animal testing, or studies of single cells or proteins, not living tissue.
- Fact 2: Isomorphic Labs, founded to build on AlphaFold, is expecting its first trials, originally planned for 2025, by the end of this year.
- Fact 3: It’s a challenge already facing the pharmaceutical industry, where 90% of drugs that are effective enough in animal testing to enter clinical trials don’t receive regulatory approval for humans.
- Fact 4: Vivodyne was spun out of the University of Pennsylvania in 2021, after Georgescu received a PhD in bioengineering there.
A biotech startup called Vivodyne says the AI drug-discovery industry has a data problem, and that it has built a machine to fix it. HIVE, modular robotic labs built by the company, can grow 20 kinds of human tissue, then autonomously dose and monitor them, generating the kind of causal biological data that today’s AI models are missing — data that today mostly comes from animal testing, or studies of single cells or proteins, not living tissue.
“Absent human testing, what are these [AI] models going to do?” asks Andrei Georgescu, Vivodyne’s CEO and co-founder. “They’re going to cure cancer in mice.” Even Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote over the weekend that claims that AI will cure cancer have become more cliché than credible — “the thing that will work is actually curing cancer,” as he put it. To be fair, the idea that AI will cure cancer is something Amodei himself has tossed out in previous essays; Sam Altman has repeatedly cited curing cancer as a justification for OpenAI’s push toward AGI and ever-larger compute buildouts; and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis said last year that AI could potentially cure all disease within a decade.
(Original synthesis pending human/AI review — generated by the stub provider by selecting real sentences from the source material, not by writing new analysis or commentary.)
Original source: TechCrunch
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