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A new biological research facility aims to give artificial intelligence something it has largely lacked: vast amounts of real-world data from living human tissues. Biotechnology company Vivodyne has launched what it describes as the world's largest human biological datacenter, using 12 robotic laboratories to run controlled experiments on millions of human tissues each year.
At the heart of the facility is Vivodyne's TissueDisk, a biological chip capable of growing hundreds of large, functional human tissues simultaneously. The company says it can produce more than 3.1 million tissue trials annually, covering more than 20 types of human tissue, including liver, lung, kidney, gut, bone marrow and eye tissue. Researchers can grow both healthy tissues and versions associated with diseases such as cancer, fibrosis and inflammation.
The goal is to combine these experiments with AI to build what Vivodyne calls a "world model" of human biology. Scientists can expose living tissues to drugs and record their responses using techniques including 3D imaging, gene-expression analysis and proteomics. AI models can then learn from these results, predict how different interventions might affect human tissues and test those predictions through further experiments.
Vivodyne says eight major pharmaceutical companies have already paid for early access to the platform, which could eventually allow drug candidates to be tested in human tissues before entering clinical trials. The technology is not a replacement for testing medicines in people, but its developers hope it will provide more human-relevant evidence earlier in drug development, potentially helping researchers identify effective treatments and safety problems before costly clinical studies begin.
