Drug development has long relied on animal models, but differences between species mean what works in animals doesn’t always translate to humans, and most drugs still fail during development. Intero Biosystems, a Denver-based startup, is developing human intestinal organoids—lab-grown tissue that mimics the gut—as an alternative way to study how drugs and other compounds might affect the human body before they are tested in people.
A Shift Towards Human-Relevant Models
Researchers and pharmaceutical companies are increasingly looking for models that better reflect human biology to supplement animal testing and reduce their reliance on it. Intero, which spun out of the University of Michigan, claims its organoids differ from simpler models that replicate only part of the gut. They contain multiple cell and tissue types found in the human intestine, which the company believes makes them a more human-relevant model for testing drugs and other compounds.
““Most drugs fail clinical trials, and I think it’s pretty easy to appreciate that we are neither mice nor flat layers of cells,” said Madeline Eiken, co-founder and CTO of Intero.
The Flagship Product: GastroScreen
The startup’s flagship product, GastroScreen, is a human intestinal organoid model that it sells to pharmaceutical, biotech, food, and chemical companies for testing drugs and other compounds. Each organoid is about one millimeter across, and the company ships roughly 100 at a time in a tube, according to Charlie Childs, co-founder and CEO. Customers can use them as healthy intestinal models or induce disease-like conditions to test how the tissue responds to different compounds.
““We’re literally shipping mini living organs in the mail to people,” Childs remarked.
Beyond the organoids themselves, Intero sells the supplies needed to grow and work with them, such as nutrient mixes that feed the cells and chemicals used in experiments. It also runs studies for customers, including designing custom experiments, performing lab tests, and delivering the resulting data. Much of this work focuses on drug safety and disease research.
Regulatory Changes Driving Interest
Founded in 2024, the startup now has seven employees and just under 10 customers after raising a $2.3 million pre-seed round last year. It generated more than $400,000 in revenue from the fourth quarter of last year through the third quarter of this year, Childs noted. Regulatory changes have also helped drive interest in alternatives to animal testing. In April 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) laid out plans to reduce its reliance on animal testing in drug development, promoting alternatives including organoids, organs-on-chips, and AI-based computational models.
