Vivodyne Announces New Vice President of Artificial Intelligence

Vivodyne — an innovative therapeutics development company that accelerates the development of safe and effective new medicines through rapid, automated experimentation on thousands of lifelike, lab-grown human organ tissues — announced today that it has expanded its leadership team with Dr. Ivana Mikic joining as its Vice President of Artificial Intelligence.

As Vice President of Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Mikic will be leading Vivodyne’s AI and machine learning strategy to develop industry-leading predictive models of pharmacology and human pathophysiology that leverage the massive quantities of realistic human data generated by Vivodyne’s proprietary Pipeline V technology.

Prior to Vivodyne, Dr. Mikic served as the Director of AI at Reveal Biosciences, where she led the company’s software development and AI research teams both in the development of a gigapixel digital pathology software platform, as well as the integration of AI into the company’s analytical data pipelines. Dr. Mikic’s work helped shape Reveal’s powerful AI capabilities, such as quantification of the health of histopathology samples, identification of diseases like cancer, and even prediction of therapeutic outcomes — which led to Reveal’s successful acquisition by CellCarta.

Before Reveal, Dr. Mikic co-founded Image Informatics and led the development of their biological image analysis software, which was acquired by Biovia and is used by over 80 pharmaceutical, biotech, and materials companies around the world. She earned her M.S in biomedical engineering from Ohio State University, and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, San Diego.

“We are extremely excited to welcome Dr. Mikic to the team. She brings an exceptional wealth of scientific knowledge and invaluable leadership experience,” remarked Dr. Andrei Georgescu, Vivodyne’s CEO. “Her leadership will bolster the ability of Vivodyne’s platform to test and predict the human efficacy and safety of thousands of groundbreaking new drugs and combination therapies at a time, and to produce new insights into the physiological responses that they produce — insights that allow Vivodyne to optimize these drugs’ molecular shape and dosing strategy to produce treatments that are safer and even more effective.”

“With our automated, preclinical human data pipeline and the power of artificial intelligence, lifesaving drugs can be made faster and much more affordably, while saving millions of animals from lab experimentation.”

“The state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques that we’re developing have the ability to accurately quantify experimental outcomes and learn to predict patterns of pharmacological responses that drastically accelerate new therapeutics’ time to market,” said Dr Mikic. “They also enable optimal experimental design, where Vivodyne’s artificial intelligence models can efficiently explore the vast space of possibilities to optimize drug combinations, dosing strategies, and even drug molecules themselves. The ability of AI to uncover important organ- and cell-level features that are too subtle for scientists to spot manually in big datasets leads to insights that feed back into and greatly enhance the drug design process itself. With our automated, preclinical human data pipeline and the power of artificial intelligence, lifesaving drugs can be made faster and much more affordably, while saving millions of animals from lab experimentation. I am thrilled to be joining the exceptionally talented team at Vivodyne, and I am very excited to contribute to technology that will radically improve the way new therapeutics are developed.”

About Vivodyne

Vivodyne revolutionizes how scientists and the pharmaceutical industry study human biology & develop therapeutics. Vivodyne’s platform technology creates a new preclinical drug development pipeline — Pipeline V — that starts and ends in automated testing on ultra realistic lab-grown human organ tissues. The company was founded at the University of Pennsylvania by Bioengineering PhD Andrei Georgescu and Associate Professor of Bioengineering Dan Huh. For more information, visit https://vivodyne.com.