NIH Partners With Organovo to Test New Drugs on 3D Printed Living Tissue
15th January 2014
Every newly developed pharmaceutical drug takes a long, winding path before it is ever administered to a human in a clinical trial. It’s first tested in a petri dish and on animals, which, it turns out, are fairly poor ways to predict how successful a drug will be for a human.
Soon, it will be possible to cut out dishes and animals and instead test drugs directly on living human tissue. San Diego-based Organovo, which develops methods to 3D print living tissue, announced today that it will partner with two National Institutes of Health groups to print tissue for medical purposes.
“Researchers who develop new therapies for patients are too often hampered by animal models and traditional cell culture models that are poor predictors of drug efficacy and toxicity in human beings,” Organovo CEO Keith Murphy said in a release. “Our 3D printer creates living human tissues that more closely reproduce in vivo human tissues.”