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.

Vivodyne's HIVE machines, are tracking hundreds of thousands of ongoing experiments where diseased tissue is exposed to some stimulus, which Georgescu expects to provide the kind of reinforcement learning that will produce AI models that understand human biology enough to make more meaningful progress in healthcare.

Georgescu believes that will be key not just for today's medicine challenges, but also for a future where complex diseases require drugs that, unlike the majority of those available today, target multiple pathways.

"If we want combination therapies, the space that has to be searched explodes - it can't be an experimental approach," he told TechCrunch. "You have to say, 'I want this effect to happen, so what cause should I invoke?' Establishing causality in human biology is the basis of all of this."

Article and Image by Tim Fernholz / TechCrunch

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