The Albany Gazette - Revalia Bio Raises $14.5M Seed Round to Launch Human Data Trial Platform and Redefine Drug Development

Despite billions spent on R&D each year, more than 90 percent of drug candidates fail to reach market approval. One of the key reasons is the poor translation from preclinical models to human biology. Animal models and in vitro systems often fall short in predicting how therapies will behave in real patients, leading to delays, cost overruns, and failed trials. Revalia is addressing this breakdown by delivering on-demand access to functional human data through its Human Data Trials - rigorous testing conducted on perfused, human organs maintained under clinical conditions.

"The old model of drug development is broken - decade-long timelines, 90% failure rates, and billion-dollar costs are no longer sustainable," said Greg Tietjen, co-founder and CEO of Revalia Bio. "We're building a new paradigm that allows us to transform the loss of one patient into the future of human-centered development - a new model grounded in real human data, not approximations," he added.

Revalia enables biotech and pharmaceutical companies to evaluate new therapies using data from real human organs, revived and sustained through proprietary perfusion technology. These organs are donated with informed consent from the families and would otherwise be unusable for clinical transplant. This approach improves the accuracy of preclinical data, reduces development costs, and eliminates risks to living patients.

"We see every donated organ as a legacy," said Kourosh Saeb-Parsy, Chief Medical Officer at Revalia Bio. "Our job is to turn that gift into progress-not just for one trial, but for a new opportunity for developing life-saving medicines," he added.

The platform unifies data from perfused human organs, donor medical histories, and high-resolution digital analytics through its Human Data Stack, delivering deeply translatable insight across discovery, safety, biodistribution, and efficacy. Through partnerships with academic medical centers and organ procurement organizations, Revalia repurposes donated, non-transplantable organs into powerful research systems that accelerate therapeutic discovery. By plugging in with existing transplant infrastructure, Revalia has enabled donors who would otherwise not be able to donate for transplantation to donate their organs for research. Donors and their families can leave a lasting legacy by contributing to the next generation of curative therapies.

Since launching commercially in 2023, Revalia has quadrupled its revenue and recently signed two of the world's top 10 pharmaceutical companies as customers. It also developed a first-of-its-kind human lung cancer model in partnership with LifeShare of Oklahoma and achieved key breakthroughs in organ perfusion, including a four-day kidney protocol.

"The ability to generate high-fidelity, human-specific data at scale is one of the most important advancements in biomedicine today," said Brian Wilcove, Managing Partner at America's Frontier Fund. "Revalia's platform has the potential to not only transform clinical trials, but to strengthen national health resilience," he added.

Revalia was founded by a multidisciplinary team of scientists, entrepreneurs, and operators. CEO Greg Tietjen, former tenure track professor at Yale, ran a renowned academic lab that was a world-leader in perfusion science. With a PhD in human organ perfusion from the University of Cambridge, Jenna DiRito brings deep experience in human organ research infrastructure. Kourosh Saeb-Parsy, Peter Buniak, and Helen Hughes add clinical and operational depth to the team. Milad Alucozai, a neuroscientist and first investor, joined the company to help scale it.

"This is about creating a new foundation for medicine, one built on human data, not animal models," said Ben Yu, Managing Partner at Sierra Ventures. "That shift will change not just how we develop treatments, but how we understand biology itself," he added.

Looking ahead, Revalia aims to serve as the foundational infrastructure for Human-Centered Drug Development - offering the insights, systems, and data needed to shift drug development away from animal models and toward truly human-first decision-making. The company's long-term vision is to provide the infrastructure and insight needed to shift drug development to truly human-centered systems that are grounded in the real world problems care providers face every day.

For more information, visit https://revaliabio.com.

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SOURCE: Revalia Bio

View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire

(L.Thomas--TAG)