Posted on 12/13/2014 8:13:28 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
New technologies such as 3D bioprinting promise to offer a laundry list of new treatments, drug discovery, and cures within the medical industry. With that said, we have been hearing promises for years that 3D printing will change the face of medicine. Despite these promises, bioprinting has yet to make any major impact within the market. Today things may have just changed!
San Diego-based 3D bioprinting company Organovo (NYSE MKT: ONVO) has today announced the full commercial availability of their exVive3D Human Liver Tissue for preclinical drug discovery testing. The tissue, which is created via an in-house 3D printer, could change the way in which pharmaceutical companies develop, discover, and test new drugs prior bringing them to market.
The exVive3D tissue will aid Organovo’s clients in predicting the toxicity drugs have to the human liver, likely speeding up discovery, and providing more accurate results. The business model for Organovo is to act as a service provider for their clients, enabling them to access this technology via their contract research program. All the testing will actually take place within Organovo’s lab, and be conducted by their laboratory services tissue experts. This enables the company to maintain full control over the process, the printing, the testing, and the data curating.
The exVive3D tissue consists of human stellate, endothelial, and hepatocytes cell types, and are proven to be functional for at least 42 days, enabling long term drug interaction studies which far exceed those made possible with 2D liver cell samples. Because of this, drug testing can be performed on the tissue over several dosages allowing for clients to discover possible longer terms issues which may not have been realized using other testing methods.
or3In a recent presentation by Dr. Deb Nguyen, the Director of R & D at Organovo, she showed just how accurate and useful exVive3D tissue can be for toxicity discovery. She presented information demonstrating the metabolic competence over time that the exVive3D tissue is able to achieve, as well as its predictability when present with known toxic substances. Further details on her presentation may be found here.
This is the moment that many of those within Organovo have been waiting for, as the company has just transitioned into a commercial entity capable of producing revenue via the sale of their bioprinted tissue, thus allowing for the funding for further R&D. The company hopes to have partial human livers available for transplant within the next five years if all goes as planned and is working with various other tissue types, such as that of breast cancer, kidney, and the pancreas. This should be the first of a series of 3D printed tissues they will gradually be bringing to market.
Let’s hear your thoughts on this groundbreaking news within the Organovo exVive3D forum thread on 3DPB.com. Check out the video below showing the company’s bioprinting process in detail.
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
Some day her prints will come…
(although she might have preferred another organ first!)
I still don’t get this technology. Can someone explain it to me in the terms of creating human parts? I get creating a whistle or some other object where powdered plastic or some other material is the ink.
Wish I could.
An organ isn’t just a glob of cells of all one type.
If my poor understanding is correct, the organ printers use something akin to a color inkjet printer to deposit layers of cells and structures to form not just the glob of cells, but to insert a network of blood vessel cells, cells lining ducts, connective and support tissue cells, and the active liver cells themselves.
Hope this helps, it might even be right...
They need to start working on making kidneys now
If only Larry Hagman had lived to see this.
Good ones! Bump.
Why cant they market “auxillary livers” for people who have to take all sorts of liver melting medications????
Exciting times, good news as they mature this technology. Someday, I'll see the Wizard, to see if he'll give me a brain!
lol
Injecting humor about the possibilities, but I’m both excited and scared about what happens when they 3D print brain tissue. I’ve seen people lose their brain function due to dementia, and fear that happening to me (my mom had it before her passing, and mom-in-law has it now but she’s 90). Someday they’ll print brain tissue to supplement our existing brain tissue and it may unlock higher intelligence for humans. But imagine experiments with animal brains (explored in countless sci-fi movies like the new Planet of the Apes), or cyborg computers with A.I. This stuff is probably decades away, but something to ponder.
In vitro testing of new drugs in live hepatocyte cell cultures is a CRITICAL step in determining if/how the new drug metabolizes and how that metabolization accelerates or blocks the metabolization of other drugs, which are key mechanisms that determine negative drug interactions.
Presumably this technology is a less expensive method of conducting this type of testing.
Already happening. Heck, they’re even working on a heart.
Scientists Can Now 3D Print Transplantable, Living Kidneys
http://gizmodo.com/scientists-can-now-3d-print-transplantable-living-kidn-1120783047
EmTech: 3-D Printing Complex Kidney Components
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531106/emtech-3-d-printing-complex-kidney-components/
The 3D printed HEART: Scientists could soon build replacement organs using a patient’s own cells
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2601548/The-3D-printed-HEART-Scientists-soon-build-replacement-organs-using-patients-cells.html#ixzz3Lp01IkSl
The 3D printer has reservoirs of whatever cells are required. From the bottom up, a few cells at a time, the device systematically places cells drop by drop, row by row, layer by layer - just like any other object, just with more precision and where the “some other material is the ink” you mention is living petri-dish-grown cells.
Between the trajectories of this technology and my health, I may very well get a 3D printed heart some day.
#2 I would want to replicate 6 of her!
One for each day of the week with Sunday a day of thanking the Lord for 3D printing!
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