Startups tout commercially 3D-printed tissue for drug screening

2 VOLUME 21 | NUMBER 1 | JANUARY 2015 NATURE MEDICINE The promise of using specially designed printers to create biomaterials for medical purposes continues to make headlines. Two years ago, for example, researchers at the at the University of Michigan announced they had helped save the life of an infant suffering from a failing trachea by creating part of a windpipe replacement using a printing device that created a specially modeled biocompatible plastic called polycaprolactone. But whereas this and other medical applications of 3D printing have largely focused on custom-designed implants made to treat a specific condition, industry and academia are increasingly considering the potential of 3D-printed cells and tissues for screening experimental therapeutic compounds, in hopes of reducing costs, shortening timelines and reducing the need for animal research in drug development. Several academic and commercial labs have already printed tiny, 3D organ-like structures called organoids; each of these tiny models might consist, for example, of kidney, cardiac or skin cells. But producing these from scratch can be labor intensive. Organovo hopes to offer a customizable alternative. In November, the San Diegobased company began offering its 3D-printed ‘exVive3D’ liver tissue models to screen pharmaceutical drugs in an effort to provide better predictors of liver toxicity early in the research pipeline. Organovo worked with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche in the earlier stages of developing the model tissue as a screening product, and plans to offer it as a part of their contract research services to drug companies. “Three-dimensional printing has really advanced in the last few years, especially for printing tissues,” explains Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a leading center for bioprinted tissues. “To create miniature organ structures that can be used for drug testing is a major area of interest right now and one of the advantages is [that] instead of Startups tout commercially 3D-printed tissue for drug screening