News | bit.bio

Modern drug testing has a human biology problem

Written by bit.bio | Oct 15, 2026, 10:38:47 AM

bit.bio featured in Drug Discovery & Development, Pharma Press

In a comprehensive feature for Drug Discovery and Development, bit.bio CEO Emma Pepperell dives into the root cause of high clinical failure rates: a reliance on preclinical animal models that do not accurately reflect human biology.

With 90% to 95% of drugs failing in human trials, the industry is facing a critical need for better biological validation. Emma explains how highly consistent, iPSC-derived human cells powered by opti-ox™ offer a scalable solution to this problem. By providing reproducible, human-relevant cells, these models not only reduce late-stage trial attrition and experimental noise but also generate the high-quality biological datasets required to power the next generation of AI-driven drug discovery platforms.

"Instead of replacing biology, AI has shifted the primary bottleneck of drug development from candidate generation to biological validation; a hurdle that can only be cleared by pairing computational scale with high-throughput, human-derived in vitro models."


Emma Pepperell CEO, bit.bio

Read the full article on page 173