Becoming Bio
Becoming Bio is building the capability to sustain mammalian development outside the body and to predict where that development goes.
- Category
- Bio and Healthcare
- Fund
- NZVC II
- Website
- becoming.bio
What Becoming Bio does
Becoming Bio's closed-loop hardware delivers nutrients, removes waste and controls gas exchange in real time, which carries development past the point where most experimental systems fail, and its AI models learn from the resulting data how a living system changes under different conditions. The company grew a mouse embryo outside the mouse, with a beating heart, an umbilical cord and a placenta it had built. Divya Dhar Cohen founded the company with Jack Cohen, after training as a medical doctor in New Zealand and taking a Wharton MBA and a Harvard MPA.
The secret
Almost everything we know about development is reconstructed after the fact, because the systems used to study it fail as metabolic demand rises. Sustaining development past that point makes it something you can perturb, measure and therefore predict.
Why NZVC invested in Becoming Bio
We backed Becoming Bio because most disease begins as a failure of development, and the tools used to study development run out long before the interesting part. Divya showed us a mouse embryo growing outside the mouse, with a beating heart and blood moving both ways through a placenta the company had built. A system that sustains development and learns from it changes what can be tested about drug safety, disease progression and the earliest stages of life.