Intero Biosystems, a Denver startup spun out of the University of Michigan, has won the Startup Battlefield competition at Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, taking home the $100,000 prize and the cup. It beat 19 rivals in a 20-strong finalist field drawn from the Battlefield 200, pitching a technology that could reshape how pharmaceutical companies screen compounds: lab-grown human mini-intestines designed to replace animal testing.
- Winner: Intero Biosystems took first place at Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2026; Australian scambaiter Apate finished second.
- Product: GastroScreen, a one-millimetre human intestinal organoid, is sold to pharmaceutical, biotech, food and chemical firms.
- Tailwind: The FDA has pushed since 2025 to reduce animal testing, naming organoids and organ-on-chip systems as alternatives.
- Caveat: The decisive comparison against animal and clinical data is still running, and manufacturing scale remains unsolved.
What GastroScreen Actually Is
GastroScreen is Intero’s flagship product: an intestinal organoid roughly one millimetre across that bundles several types of human gut cells and tissues, not merely the epithelial lining. Chief executive and co-founder Charlie Childs says the company ships around 100 organoids in a single tube by courier to each customer.
The tissue is grown from induced pluripotent stem cells — adult cells reprogrammed so they can become almost any cell type — generated from a blood sample. Co-founder and chief technology officer Madeline Eiken says that approach enables larger-scale production and, further down the road, models tailored to individual patients.
Drawing on National Institutes of Health data, the organoid contains epithelium, fibroblasts, smooth muscle, blood vessels and neurons. Customers can run it as healthy intestine or induce disease-like conditions to watch how the tissue responds to a drug. Intero also sells the nutrients and reagents the cultures need, and designs bespoke studies.
The Regulatory Tailwind
Timing helps. On 10 April 2025 the FDA announced a plan to reduce, refine or replace animal testing in the development of monoclonal antibodies and other drugs, listing organoids, organ-on-chip systems and AI-driven computational models among the alternatives — a group regulators call new approach methodologies, or NAMs.
In March 2026 the agency published draft guidance on how such methods should be validated for regulatory submissions. That document sets out a framework rather than endorsing any single platform, but Eiken credits legal changes in the United States with persuading previously reluctant drugmakers to bring organoids into their own laboratories.
Intero is not alone. Altis Biosystems and InSphero sell competing intestinal models, while MIMETAS bets on organ-on-chip hardware. AI is crowding in too, with molecular search tools such as DrugCLIP promising to accelerate the hunt for candidate compounds.
The Unproven Part: Does It Beat a Mouse?
Not yet demonstrated, and the company says so. Childs places Intero in the second of three validation phases. The first confirmed that GastroScreen contains the gut’s key tissues. The second, currently under way, tests known drugs; the company has observed the expected responses to a compound that reduces intestinal inflammation and to agents that damage the gut.
The third and decisive phase will benchmark results against the animal and clinical data pharmaceutical companies already hold. Those studies are running with several partners, according to Childs.
A Small Team With Large Ambitions
Intero is tiny. Founded in 2024, it employs seven people and serves just under ten customers. It raised $2.3 million in a pre-seed round last year and booked more than $400,000 in revenue between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the third quarter of 2026. It has also received a $1.05 million SBIR Phase II grant from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences to standardise manufacturing, freezing and quality control, with work running to mid-2028.
Today it produces a few thousand organoids per batch and wants to automate its way to hundreds of thousands. Longer term it aims at personalised medicine using a patient’s own cells, licensing the biological data its models generate to drugmakers and AI companies, and eventually building an artificial intestine. Second place at the competition went to Apate, an Australian startup founded by Dali Kaafar at Macquarie University, which deploys thousands of AI agents posing as scam victims to bait fraudsters.
The win signals that science-heavy startups can still command a stage dominated by software and AI. Intero’s restraint is its most attractive quality: it has not claimed that GastroScreen outperforms animal models before the evidence exists. The hard part ahead is industrial rather than scientific — scaling from thousands of identical organoids per batch to hundreds of thousands is a manufacturing problem, and it is where many promising biotechs stall. Solve it, and the third validation phase could turn organoids from a curiosity into standard equipment in drug development.