Organovo Holdings, Inc. is a manufacturer and creator of functional 3-Dimensional human tissues that are applied in therapeutic applications and medical research. Organovo collaborates with academic and pharmaceutical partners in order to come up with 3D human biological disease models.

With the current innovation of the 3D bioprinted liver tissue, it opens a lot of possibilities and new hopes when it comes to drug discovery. Discovering drugs is an easy process but testing the drugs for safety is another issue that consumes time, effort and a huge amount of resources. Drugs can take years and years of safety studies in order to be approved. With the 3D bioprinted liver tissues the potential to study the course of action of a drug in real time greatly reduces the cost and amount of time to study its effect.

There are already 2D bioprinted liver tissue cultures being used, however it only has the ability to live within a 2-day time frame. This is a very short time when it comes to assessing the drug’s long-term effect. However, with the latest 3D bioprinted liver, it can live up to 40-days and even retain key liver functions. Through additional studies, these 3D liver tissues were able to show dose-dependent responses to acetaminophen. Acetaminophen is a well-known and well-studied liver toxic drug. This only further proves the potential value of the 3D bioprinted liver tissues as a medium to accurately assess drug toxicity to the liver as well as multiple dose and sub-acute effects of the drug.

With the positive results shown by Organo’s 3D bioprinted liver tissues, this invention is hoped to offer the pharmaceutical industry and its researchers an innovative way to study tissue and biochemical responses in real time. Hopefully, it hastens the speed of finding novel drugs without the unwanted adverse side effects.