Denver startup offers human gut organoids for drug testing in place of animal models
US startup Intero Biosystems grows human intestinal organoids in the lab that drugmakers can use to supplement animal testing. The company is still validating its model and is in the second of three stages.
Intero Biosystems, a Denver-based biotech startup, is developing human intestinal organoids: lab-grown tissue that mimics the gut. The aim is to let researchers assess how drugs and other compounds affect the human body before they are tried in people. The company presented at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, where it is one of 20 startups competing for the Startup Battlefield title. The topic matters because animal models do not always reflect human biology, and most drugs still fail during development.
What GastroScreen is
Intero, a spinout of the University of Michigan, sells its flagship product, GastroScreen, to pharmaceutical, biotech, food and chemical companies. Each organoid is about one millimeter across, and roughly 100 are shipped in a single tube by mail. Customers can use them as healthy gut models or induce disease-like conditions. The company also sells the supplies needed to grow them and runs custom studies. Co-founder and CTO Madeline Eiken says the organoids contain several cell and tissue types found in the intestine, and are derived from induced pluripotent stem cells, which can be generated from a blood sample.
Regulation and validation
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) set out plans last April to reduce reliance on animal testing, and in March this year issued draft guidance on validating new approach methodologies, or non-animal testing methods. Co-founder and CEO Charlie Childs acknowledges that evidence of GastroScreen's predictive accuracy is still being built: the company is in the second of three validation stages, testing well-known drugs. In the final stage it will compare results directly with pharmaceutical companies' existing animal and clinical data.
Company status
Founded in 2024, Intero has seven employees and just under 10 customers. It raised a $2.3 million pre-seed round last year and generated more than $400,000 in revenue from the fourth quarter of last year through the third quarter of this year. It plans to scale production to hundreds of thousands of organoids per batch and later move into personalized medicine.
