organ-on-a-chip
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Andrei Georgescu
Andrei Georgescu is the co-founder and CEO of Vivodyne, a biotech company that grows human tissues in the lab and runs drugs through them with robots and AI before any human ever swallows a pill. A University of Pennsylvania bioengineering PhD who once sent lab-grown tissue to space with NASA, he started Vivodyne in 2020 because roughly 19 of every 20 drugs that work in animals fail in people. His pitch is blunt: test human medicine on human tissue, not on mice. In May 2025 Vivodyne raised a $40 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures to scale a 23,000-square-foot fully robotic lab in South San Francisco.
Nicholas Geisse
Nicholas Geisse is the CEO of Curi Bio, a Seattle biotech building human-relevant tissue platforms that make lab-grown muscle and heart cells behave more like the real thing. A Cambridge-trained pharmacologist who learned to wire up tiny instruments in Kevin Kit Parker's cardiac engineering lab at Harvard, he spent years at Asylum Research selling and designing atomic force microscopes before joining Curi Bio as Chief Science Officer in 2017. He led development of the Mantarray 3D engineered-muscle-tissue platform and the company's NIH-backed R&D program, then stepped up to chief executive in 2023. His work has collected an Xconomy 'Big Idea' award, an SBA Tibbetts award, and an Edison Award.