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Exclusive: Organovo CEO On The Role Of 3D Printing In Health Care

3D printing has found its way into a number of industries, including health care and medical technology.

Organovo Holdings Inc (NYSE: ONVO), in particular, is one of the companies researching how 3D-printed technology can be useful in medical fields. The company focuses on the design and creation of three-dimensional human tissues for use in medical research and therapeutic applications.

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Organovo recently announced a partnership with the Yale School of Medicine to develop bio-printed tissues for surgical transplantation. CEO Keith Murphy was kind enough to take the time to sit down with Benzinga and talk about how 3D printing is changing the world of health care.

The Man

BZ: Why did you decide to join Organovo?

KM: The opportunity to make something of 100 percent of cells, to me just from a big picture perspective, made a lot of sense because if you can create a tissue that is made entirely of cells, there is no reason that it shouldn’t behave like a tissue. We work at a very small scale right now so we are making, what I would say is small tissue but that gives the best possible functional connection to a native organ, and then we will still face the challenge in the future of growing that to be a larger organ.

The Technology

BZ: What role does 3D printing play in health care?

KM: There is a broad set of 3D printing activities in health care. We represent one aspect of that. Again, we are working with the living cells. If you look at some of the things that a company known as Medical Modeling was doing, and they have been acquired by 3D Systems Corporation, but they do work on helping physicians build, for example, specific implants out of plastic or metal for a patient that are going to be sized to that patient, which I think is really powerful application. Some of the things you will see in 3D printing in the medical space are traditional materials used in medical devices, and I think that is a really powerful application. That is something that you are going to see other companies doing. Then, we are working on the cellular side.

The Company

BZ: What does Organovo, specifically, do with 3D printing?

KM: There is a number of applications on our side, as well. We have launched 3D liver for use and drug research. The application there is basically, in a nutshell, to be better than potentially displaced animal models because animal models can only be so good in terms of their prediction value for a drug. You see a lot of drugs fail in human trials and that's because you don’t have perfect information when you enter a human trial.

Now, I am not saying we are going to get people's perfect information, but I think, can we make that information a lot better by the time they get into the human? I think we can. I think the data we are showing in liver is already starting to lay that out. The second big application is going to be building these tissues for direct implants, so think about making a liver patch that can help someone who has failing liver function. Think about a heart muscle patch for someone who had a heart attack for example.

The Partnership

BZ: Organovo recently announced a partnership with the Yale School of Medicine. Can you tell me more about that?

KM: The Yale work is definitely targeted toward trying to make tissues and eventually organs for transplant. One thing to notice that it is actually our strategy to work with great academic centers to do that because that work in terms of getting into a full organ. That is the work that is better for us to partner with people who can get outside funding and advance that work rather than us spending our direct capital on it. We will provide the printer. We provide expertise.

The Methuselah Foundation, if you saw the announcement, is providing some of the funding. Other funding will, of course, come from Federal agencies as it applies for grants. Then we can solve some of the challenges that are necessary to make bigger tissues, one of those is actually making blood vessels inside of larger tissues because that's something that is going to be necessary to vast the variety of tissues.

See more from Benzinga

© 2014 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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