Intero Biosystems Develops Lab-Grown Human Intestines to Replace Animal Testing in Drug Development

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Intero Biosystems offers scalable human intestinal organoids as advanced models for drug and compound testing, aiming to reduce reliance on animal models in pharmaceutical research.

Intero Biosystems, a Denver-based startup founded in 2024 and spun out of the University of Michigan, is pioneering the development of human intestinal organoids to improve preclinical drug testing. These lab-grown mini intestines, called GastroScreen, replicate multiple cell and tissue types found in the human gut, capturing a level of biological complexity that surpasses simpler flat-cell cultures and traditional animal models. This innovation arrives amid growing regulatory and industry momentum toward alternatives to animal testing, a longtime standard in drug development that often falls short in predicting human outcomes.

Each GastroScreen organoid measures about one millimeter in diameter and is derived from induced pluripotent stem cells, adult cells reprogrammed to differentiate into nearly any cell type. Intero’s approach enables scalable production and the potential for personalized models tailored to individual patients, unlike competing models derived from patient tissue samples collected via invasive procedures. The company ships these living mini organs to pharmaceutical, biotech, food, and chemical firms, which either use them as healthy tissue models or induce disease-like conditions to assess drug or compound interactions.

In addition to supplying organoids, Intero provides media and reagents necessary for organoid cultivation and experimentation and offers contract research services, including custom study design and data analysis focused on drug safety and disease mechanisms affecting the gut. Their customers can evaluate, for example, the potential gut toxicity of drug candidates or how diseased intestinal tissue responds to treatment.

Co-founder and CEO Charlie Childs and CTO Madeline Eiken emphasize that GastroScreen organoids are part of a broader shift endorsed by regulatory agencies like the FDA, which in recent years have issued guidance encouraging the validation and use of non-animal testing methods. This regulatory evolution has made pharmaceutical companies more receptive to incorporating such human-relevant models into their pipelines.

Currently, Intero is in the process of validating GastroScreen’s predictive utility. Following initial demonstrations that the organoids contain key gut tissues, the startup is testing them against drugs with well-characterized human effects, showing expected responses to both anti-inflammatory agents and compounds known for gut toxicity. A final validation phase will directly compare GastroScreen data with existing animal and clinical results. Intero is collaborating with multiple pharmaceutical companies in these ongoing studies.

While Intero does not incorporate artificial intelligence in producing organoids, it envisions leveraging the biological data generated from these systems to feed AI models used in drug discovery. The startup plans to license such datasets to pharmaceutical and AI enterprises in the future.

Looking ahead, Intero aims to scale its manufacturing capacity from producing a few thousand organoids at a time to hundreds of thousands through automation. Longer-term goals include advancing personalized medicine applications by creating patient-specific organoids for individualized drug testing and ultimately engineering an artificial intestine. Intero’s technology was recently showcased at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where it is competing in the Startup Battlefield event.