About PulmonaVat
PulmonaVat was founded with a deeply personal mission: to improve respiratory healthcare through ethical, human-relevant innovation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our CEO and co-founder, PhD. Alicia Reyes Valenzuela, experienced the painful loss of her father to this severe respiratory infection. This tragedy, shared by so many during that time, underscored the urgent need for more effective tools to address both emerging respiratory threats and chronic lung diseases—especially for patients who currently lack adequate treatments.
Motivated by this experience, Alicia created PulmonaVat to develop predictive lung in-vitro models that can accelerate drug discovery, enable personalized medicine, and ultimately improve patient outcomes.
PulmonaVat’s next-generation lung organoids are ethically developed from human cells, with the goal of replacing animal testing. Our models uniquely replicate adult lung tissue with complex morphology and function, offering a highly predictive and physiologically relevant platform for testing therapies with greater accuracy and translatability.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), chronic respiratory conditions and viral infections remain among the top 10 causes of death worldwide. At PulmonaVat, we are committed to changing that. Our technology, developed during Alicia’s PhD at McGill University, is now being refined and scaled in the Leiden Bio Science Park in the Netherlands, where PulmonaVat was officially founded.
Rooted in integrity, innovation, and compassion—for people and animals—we aim to build a future where lung diseases are better understood, better treated, and eventually prevented, without relying on animal experiments.