Building a Better Mouse Cage
Instead of humans, Vium uses tiny sensors and high-definition cameras to observe lab mice.
Photographer: Damien Maloney for Bloomberg Businessweek
Much of the groundwork for important new drugs starts with tests conducted on lab mice, of which there are an estimated 100 million around the world. The Ph.D.s and technicians who observe them often spend their time on rote tasks that a Silicon Valley startup called Vium wants to automate.
Co-founders Timothy Robertson, a physicist, and Joe Betts-Lacroix, an inventor who has sold inventions to Google, started Vium in 2013 with a mission to update mouse labs using cheap sensors, deep learning software, and virtually no humans. “We derived more data and better-quality data without exposing the mice to the stress of human contact,” says Robertson, who is also chief executive officer.