Organovo

Organovo

Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE MKT: ONVO
Industry	3D Bioprinting
Founded	2007
Headquarters	San Diego, California, USA
Website	www.organovo.com

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

Organovo anticipates that the bioprinting of human tissues will accelerate the preclinical drug testing and discovery process, enabling treatments to be created more quickly and at lower cost. Additionally, Organovo has long-term expectations that this technology could be suitable for surgical therapy and transplantation.^[1] With reproducible 3D tissues that accurately represent human biology, they are enabling ground-breaking therapies in a number of different ways. Organovo is partnering with biopharmaceutical companies and academic medical centers to design, build, and validate more predictive in vitro tissues for disease modeling and toxicology. In addition, they are giving researchers something they have never had before: the opportunity to test drugs on functional human tissues before ever administering the drug to a living person; bridging the gulf between preclinical testing and clinical trials. Lastly, the company is creating functional, three dimensional tissues that can be implanted or delivered into the human body to repair or replace damaged or diseased tissues. ^[2]

Corporate governance

As of 2014, the company's executive vice-president of commercial operations was Mike Renard.^[3]:1

The Process

Given that every tissue in the body is naturally compartmentalized of different cell types, many technologies for printing these cells vary in their ability to ensure stability and viability of the cells during the manufacturing process. Some of the methods that are used for 3D bioprinting of cells are photolithography, magnetic bioprinting, stereolithography, and direct cell extrusion. Typically, the first step used is getting a biopsy of the organ. From this examination, certain cells are isolated and multiplied. These cells are then mixed with a special liquefied material that provides oxygen and other nutrients to keep them alive. Finally, the mixture is placed in a printer cartridge and structured using the patients’ medical scans. ^[4]

References