AI isn’t close to curing cancer. This startup says it knows what it will take.
Biotech startup Vivodyne argues that current AI drug discovery efforts are failing because they lack high-quality human biological data. The company is using modular robotic labs to generate this data, challenging the industry's reliance on animal testing and theoretical models.
Why it matters
It addresses the gap between the hype surrounding AI in healthcare and the practical limitations of current data-driven drug discovery models.
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 cliche than credible — “the thing that will work is actually curing cancer, ” as he put it.
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