Vivodyne — an innovative biotechnology company whose platform accelerates the development of more effective new medicines through iterative testing on thousands of lifelike, lab-grown human organ tissues at a time — announced today that it has expanded its executive team with Dr. Susan Billings joining as its Chief Commercial Officer.
As Chief Commercial Officer, Dr. Billings will be leading Vivodyne’s commercial and global business development strategy for bringing their disruptive platform to market.
“Our approach for efficient drug discovery and development through our transformative platform will accelerate bringing safer, more effective medicines to patients and will unequivocally contribute to a pivotal shift in how we discover and develop drugs in the future.” says Dr. Billings.
“Vivodyne’s transformative platform for massively scalable drug testing yields complex, patient-level human data — before a drug is ever tested in humans — and has attracted the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. I am both passionate and excited to cultivate and build partnerships within the industry to achieve Vivodyne’s patient-driven vision.”
Dr. Billings is an accomplished commercial leader in the global life science industry. She brings over a decade of experience in client-relationship growth and partnership, technology launch, commercial strategy, business transformation, and both building and scaling business development teams in a high-growth environment. Dr. Billings joins Vivodyne from a 11-year career at Curia (formerly AMRI), where she served as Vice President & Global Head of Business Development and led Curia’s global business development teams for drug discovery, development and manufacturing for biologics and small molecules, fine chemicals, and analytical & laboratory testing services. After earning her doctorate from UC Irvine in organic chemistry and before Curia, Dr. Billings advanced through technical and operational roles at an oncology start-up and then at Merck.
“I consider myself very fortunate to have joined such a mission-driven organization with a talent-rich team developing truly innovative technology at Vivodyne. I am excited to further advance industry adoption of this new platform to help overcome the greatest bottleneck in drug development: lack of human clinical translation from preclinical animal data. Vivodyne’s technology has the potential to revolutionize how the industry approaches drug development because it provides lifelike human data before a clinical trial, and at incredible pace and scale. The competitive advantage that Vivodyne brings to the market presents a trifecta for simultaneously navigating the complexity of human biology with unparalleled realism of our lab-grown human tissues, with unrivaled process automation, while generating consistent, feature-rich datasets for predictive AI. Any life science company developing a therapeutic will strongly benefit.”
Vivodyne CEO Andrei Georgescu remarked, “Dr. Billings brings an exceptionally rare combination of world-class experience in commercial strategy, strong character, and deep scientific expertise to Vivodyne. I cannot overstate how thrilled we are to have her join our team and contribute so critically to our mission. Her leadership will dramatically accelerate our ability to keep pace with the strong market demand we are experiencing, while also fostering new co-development partnerships to develop the next generation of lifesaving medicines with world-leading pharmaceutical companies and biotherapeutics start-ups alike.”
“By testing and optimizing new drug candidates in animals, we have cured them of cancers, increased their lifespan, and reversed chronic conditions like heart disease and COPD,” says Dr. Billings. “It’s time we start testing directly on the living human tissues produced at Vivodyne, so we can unravel the complexity of human biology and achieve the same lifechanging outcomes in people.”
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 for automated, high-throughput testing on functional lab-grown human organ tissues, while generating large datasets to power their predictive AI. 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.
