CAARE applauds the vision of scientists like Jo Varshney and the work of companies like VeriSim Life, whose mission aligns with our own to promote superior human-based science that can surpass painful and flawed experiments on animals.
At the heart of the wave of new technologies to replace animals in
research are the biotech companies utilizing modern scientific methods that
are fundamentally human, and not derived from animals.
CAARE recently connected with Dr. Jo Varshney, CEO and founder of VeriSIM
Life. She established her company to solve the critical bottleneck in
getting life-saving therapeutics from development to patients, a problem
that is largely due to poor translatability from animal tests.
In founding VeriSIM Life, Dr. Varshney assembled a team of life scientists,
modeling scientists, machine learning experts, and experienced software
engineers, to address this major hurdle in the drug development process. The
result was the creation of VeriSIM Life, which utilizes machine learning and
computer models to accurately predict critical drug information.
VeriSIM’s platform simulates drug interactions within the entire body every
one hundredth of a second to obtain critical drug information such as
organ-based toxicities, drug metabolism and drug interactions without a
single animal experiment. The product is already being implemented and
tested by scientists who recognize the value in getting the right drugs to
patients quicker and with minimal animal testing.
Scientists, health clinicians and the public alike are increasingly aware
that the average time to develop a potentially life-saving drug therapy is
estimated to take 10-15 years and cost over $2 billion dollars for each
FDA-approved drug.
Even as a child, Dr. Varshney had a fierce passion for applying technology
to unsolved problems in healthcare. Learning computer programming at age 8,
she began to formulate the idea that the most challenging problems could be
overcome by the fusion of expertise across disciplines.
Dr. Varshney applied this integrative approach during her early career as a
veterinarian, and later as a PhD researcher in comparative oncology and
computer science. However, she quickly found herself frustrated with the
slow pace of innovation and the seemingly endless timelines to develop new
therapeutics entering the market.
One of the largest, highly inaccurate, and most expensive bottlenecks in the
drug development process is animal testing. This FDA-mandated stage is
required before a drug can be considered for human trials, yet a staggering
92% of all compounds that pass animal safety tests ultimately fail to
achieve FDA approval.
CAARE applauds the vision of scientists like Jo Varshney and the work of
companies like VeriSim Life, whose mission aligns with our own to promote
superior human-based science that can surpass painful and flawed experiments
on animals.
Return to Alternatives to Animal Testing, Experimentation and Dissection