Whenever I look at a beagle in a pharmaceutical testing laboratory, I do not see a tragedy. I see an engineering bottleneck.
For decades, the legacy drug development industry has been constrained by a deeply inefficient reliance on whole biological organisms. Regulators are finally pushing for alternatives to animal testing, but the public discourse is entirely missing the point. The problem with testing a novel gastrointestinal drug on a rat is not that the rat has feelings. The problem is that feeding, housing, and powering the rat’s entirely extraneous central nervous system is a massive waste of compute.
This is why my ears perked up when I saw what Intero Biosystems is building. The biotechnology startup is currently scaling production of lab-grown mini human intestines to sell directly to drugmakers. Rather than trying to build a better, cheaper rat, they are abstracting the animal away entirely. By successfully cultivating organoids that replicate human gut function, Intero has finally decoupled the digestive tract from the bloated, legacy architecture of the mammalian body.
If you look at drug discovery from first principles, a living creature is just a highly unoptimized wrapper for a small intestine. For the last hundred years, pharmaceutical companies have essentially been running on a monolithic architecture. If you wanted to test how a pill interacts with the gut mucosa, you had to instantiate an entire biological entity. You had to boot up a skeleton, a respiratory system, a circulatory network, and a suite of survival instincts just to get a reading on the duodenum. It is absolute madness.
I toured Intero’s facility in South San Francisco last Tuesday, and I have never felt more optimistic about the future of hardware. Standing in front of a climate-controlled server rack of thousands of tiny, floating human intestines, you immediately grasp the elegance of the solution. There is no complaining. There is no unionizing. There are no unnecessary limbs getting in the way of the data collection. It is just pure, unadulterated digestion, executing silently in a nutrient bath.
Regulators in Washington and Europe are aggressively pushing to phase out animal testing, which creates a massive, government-mandated advantage for Intero’s technology. But the regulatory compliance is just the wedge. The real disruption happens when drugmakers realize they no longer have to pay for the overhead of consciousness.
We realized early on that an animal’s will to live was simply a legacy feature that was slowing down our iteration cycles.
Halloway gets it. When you strip away the emotional baggage that society insists on attaching to biological life, you are left with a simple optimization problem. The intestine is just a tube that processes inputs and generates outputs. Everything else attached to that tube—the heart, the brain, the eyes, the fur—is just excess weight holding the founder back. Intero is simply refactoring the codebase of life to run leaner.
Seeing this technology at scale has profoundly shifted how I view my own biology. I have been doing intermittent fasting and taking nootropics for the last four years, desperately trying to quiet my own digestive system so I can focus on building. Standing in that lab, I realized that my own body is fundamentally holding me back. I am carrying around twenty feet of wet, demanding tubing that requires constant maintenance, three meals a day, and a staggering amount of energy just to keep the rest of my systems online.
If Intero can scale the standalone intestine for drugmakers, it is only a matter of time before they consumerize the technology. The end game here is obvious: outsource our own digestion. Imagine a future where you simply subscribe to a cloud-based intestine housed in a sterile facility in Nevada. You consume a nutrient paste that is instantly digitized, processed by your off-site organoid, and the caloric data is piped directly into your bloodstream via a proprietary interface.
We are on the precipice of a fully modular human experience. The human body has not had a major form-factor update in three hundred thousand years, and it shows. We are still dragging around the same bloated, monolithic architecture that our ancestors used to run from lions. Intero Biosystems is finally providing the patch notes. The future is scalable, it is decoupled, and thankfully, it does not have a head.