Organovo

Organovo

Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE MKT: ONVO
Industry	Biotech
Founded	2007
Headquarters	San Diego, California, USA
Area served	Worldwide
Revenue	US$ 1,483,000 (2016)
Total assets	US$ 62,091,000 (2016)
Website	www.organovo.com

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Organovo is an early-stage medical laboratory and research company which designs and develops functional, three dimensional human tissue (also known as 3D bioprinting technology) for medical research and therapeutic applications. Organovo was established in 2007 and is headquartered in San Diego, California. The company uses its internally developed NovoGen MMX Bioprinter for 3D bioprinting.

Operations

The company bioprints and markets human tissues as a means of accelerating the preclinical drug testing and discovery process, enabling treatments to be created more quickly and at lower cost, and without immediate risks to living test subjects. Organovo has long-term expectations that this technology could be suitable for surgical therapy and transplantation.^[2] Organovo also partners with biopharmaceutical companies and academic medical centers to design, build, and validate more predictive in vitro tissues for disease modeling and toxicology. The living test tissues provide researchers the opportunity to test drugs before administering the drug to a living person; this bridges the gap between preclinical testing and clinical trials.

Organovo is actively developing its technology with the intention of eventually being able to replicate entire human organs for transplant.^[3]

As of 2014, the company's executive vice-president of commercial operations was Mike Renard.^[4]

In 2015, Organovo signed an agreement to provide processes and technology to produce 3D printed human skin to L'Oreal for use in testing the safety and efficacy of cosmetic products.^[5]

3d bioprinting process

The human body is made up of different cell types and many technologies for printing these cells vary in their ability to ensure stability and viability of the cells during the manufacturing process. The methods used for 3D bioprinting of cells are photolithography, magnetic bioprinting, stereolithography, and direct cell extrusion. In each process, a physical biopsy of an organ is required. Certain cells from the biopsy are isolated and multiplied. These cells are then mixed with a liquefied material that provides oxygen and other nutrients to keep them alive outside of the human body. The mixture is then placed in a printer cartridge and structured using the patients’ medical scans.^[6]

References