The vision of Life Science Leader is to help facilitate connections and foster collaborations in pharma and med device development to get more life-saving and life-improving therapies to market in an efficient manner. Connect, Collaborate, Contribute
Issue link: https://lifescienceleadermag.epubxp.com/i/320415
insights DRUG DEVELOPMENT LIFESCIENCELEADER.COM JUNE 2014 58 formulated to form the bioink), loaded into a cartridge, and inserted into the 3D printer, which is about 2' x 2' x 1.5'. If printing liver tissues, a 24-well plate is printed in about 45 minutes and usable for testing in just two days. "Three-dimensional bioprinted tissues can help pharmaceutical companies speed up the drug discovery process allowing R&D; teams to test new and promising drugs on functional human tissues during hit-to-lead (H2L) and lead optimization stages of drug develop- ment," says Murphy. "This will help iden- tify potential toxicity and efficacy issues before drugs ever enter clinical studies." In addition, these tissues last more than 40 days, which is a vast improvement over their 2D counterparts, which can only last for 48 hours. This would enable researchers to dose, monitor, and sample the same tissue over a longer period of time, allowing them to detect more subtle or longer-term effects. In addition to liver tissues, Organovo can biopsy cancer cells from a patient, grow them, and make 3D bioprinted tumors to test new drugs. Entering into 3D bioprinting at the right stage of drug development is critical. For instance, it would not make sense to pursue 3D bio- printing for a pharmaceutical or bio- logic company that wanted to screen C I N D Y D U B I N Contributing Editor Three-dimensional (3D) printing is a 20-year-old technology whose time finally seems to have arrived. Interest in the equipment rose sharply last year; in 2012, the market for 3D products reached $777 million and could reach $8.4 billion by 2025 as medical uses for the printers are being developed, according to Lux Research. O By C. Dubin 3D BIOPRINTING COULD SPEED UP DRUG DEVELOPMENT 3D Bioprinting Could Speed Up Drug Development ne company focused on the medical use of these printers is San Diego-based Organovo Holdings, a biotech firm that designs and creates functional, 3D human tissues for medical research and therapeu- tic applications. In January 2014, Organovo delivered its first 3D liver tissue to an outside laboratory for experimentation, marking a milestone toward commercial launch of a 3D liver tissue product. "These 3D human tissues have the potential to accelerate the drug discovery process, enabling treatments to be developed faster and at lower cost," explains Keith Murphy, Organovo's CEO and president, who previ- ously worked at Alkermes and Amgen. A TOXICITY PREDICTOR Organovo has focused its attention on the liver because, as Murphy explains, about 10 percent of all drugs in Phase 3 clinical testing fail due to liver toxicity. "One reason for that failure is because we currently test the drugs on animals or on cells on a Petri dish surface, and that just doesn't work for liver testing," he says. "We see projects get green-lighted to move into clinical trials, but subtle effects of the drug on the liver come out over time." As an alternative to animal testing and Petri dishes, Organovo is building what Murphy claims is a better model of the human liver. The company's pro- prietary bioprinting platform enables the reproducible, automated creation of living human tissues that mimic the form and function of native tissues in the body. The 3D bioprinted human tis- sues are constructed from tiny building blocks made of living human cells using a process that translates tissue-specific geometries and cellular components into 3D designs that can be executed by an Organovo NovoGen Bioprinter. Once built, the bioprinted tissues share many key features with native tissue, includ- ing tissue-like cellular density, presence of multiple cell types, and the devel- opment of key architectural and func- tional features associated with the target native tissue. Organovo's 3D human tissues offer many advantages over standard cell-cul- ture platforms due to the fact that three- dimensionality is achieved without dependence on biomaterial or scaffold components that would not be found in native tissues. Organovo's bioprinting technology was developed by the com- pany's scientific founder, Prof. Gabor Forgacs, at the University of Missouri Medical Center at Columbia in 2003. The living cells, taken from an individu- al, are bioinked (i.e., cells are treated and 0 6 1 4 _ D r u g _ D e v . i n d d 1 0614_Drug_Dev.indd 1 5 / 2 1 / 2 0 1 4 1 1 : 5 7 : 3 5 A M 5/21/2014 11:57:35 AM