Penn Researchers Develop Program to Automate Tissue Culturing and Speed Up Drug Development

A team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania has created a program designed to automate tissue culturing. This initiative uses advanced technology, known as organ-on-a-chip, to provide more accurate models of human body parts for testing new drugs.

Bioengineering professor Dan Dongeun Huh teamed up with Andrei Georgescu after they met on campus when Georgescu was a student at Penn. They discovered that both were interested in drug testing and tissue development, which led them to brainstorm ideas for improving the collection of preclinical data before human trials.

The researchers use tiny devices to grow cells. These techniques were initially developed for manufacturing computer chips. The devices are equipped with organ-on-a-chip technology, allowing hundreds of samples to be grown on a single disk and streamlining the culturing process.

When developing new drugs, scientists usually test them on simplified models or animals. However, this approach doesn’t accurately replicate what cells experience in the human body, making it fundamentally flawed.

‘99% of the drugs entering clinical trials fail,’ Huh explained. ‘It costs close to $1 billion to develop just one successful drug.’ This highlights a pressing need for more efficient and effective testing methods that can help reduce these failures.

The Penn researchers’ program uses robots to manufacture human tissues, test 10,000 lab-grown cell models simultaneously, and generate data within one to two weeks. The startup partners with pharmaceutical companies to determine which drugs are administered during testing.

Vivodyne’s HIVE laboratories currently operate in San Francisco and Philadelphia, with plans for further expansion. This is not the only innovation born at Penn - other AI startups have also emerged from the university, including an early-stage mortgage company aiming to modernize loan processing.