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What Can 3D Printed Human Livers Do For Medicine?


cdmalcom

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The 3D bioprinting company Organovo started mass producing functioning miniature models of the human liver more than a year ago. (Did you miss that news?) Pharmaceutical companies are all over the product and demand is high.

Each liver Organovo prints is about the size of the tip of a ball point pin. While they wouldn’t be much use for transplants, the livers are a great facsimile of the real deal, even taking on the roughly hexagonal shape that the cells in our livers also create.

But what could the world do with a bunch of tiny, functioning models of the human liver? Apparently, a whole lot.

A Boon for the Pharmaceutical Industry

Pharmaceutical companies have long been looking for ways to test experimental drugs on human tissue without accidentally killing anyone. With these new livers, they have the perfect opportunity.

Most often when drugs are recalled by the US Food and Drug Administration, it’s because they cause some kind of liver damage that was previously unknown to pharmacologists. Companies try to prevent these hiccups with thorough testing. In addition to testing drugs on animal tissue, they also traditionally test them with samples of living human hepatocyte cells, which are found in the liver and give an approximation of how the liver will react to the drugs. The only problem is that the cells only live for about 48 hours, so tests of the long-term effects of liver exposure to the drugs are impossible.

organovo printer

Organovo’s tiny livers solve that problem. These hexagonal structures can live for more than 42 days, functioning and producing proteins like a real liver. Suddenly, the most common reason for recalling drugs has a testable solution. Indeed, Organovo has already been able to detect the negative effects of a certain recalled drug with their liver models, something the hepatocyte cells alone never detected. If the livers had been available before, the drug would have never made it to market.

Organ Patches of the Future

The next step for Organovo is to figure out how to print out larger pieces of liver tissue, as well as for other organs. Their hope is that doctors will be able to graft their products onto the organs of sick patients. Animal tests are already in the works.

"If you could get to something large enough to get to, for example, 10 percent of an organ's function, it can significantly benefit the patient," says CEO Keith Murphy.

bioprinter New

How It All Works

So what exactly goes into printing livers at Organovo? (That’s a sentence I never thought I’d type.) Well, the printer uses two bio-ink syringes, one filled with thousands of parenchymal liver cells and the other filled with non-parenchymal liver cells that promote cellular growth. Then computer software instructs the robotic arm of the printer to print the mold with intense precision. Sensors near the printer ensure that the cells are taking on the appropriate hexagonal shape. Once three hexagons are arranged on the printing tray like a honeycomb, the first syringe fills them with parenchymal cells. The printer is finished when 24 microtissues are created, each of them about 250 microns thick. Engineers then put the livers in an incubator, where the cells fuse into the complex structure of liver tissue. Voila! Tiny livers.

The burning question is, when are we going to start seeing full organs printed out?

“I believe that could happen in my life time,” said chief technology officer Sharon Presnell.

Photo Credits: PopularScience

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