Organovo Holdings, Inc. (ONVO)

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Top 10 Innovations 2016-ONVO is #2 12/1/16

Here's the link for the full article-
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/47537/title/Top-10-Innovations-2016/

Organovo >> ExVive Human Kidney Tissue

A crucial stage of drug development is testing whether a candidate compound damages the kidneys, but existing cell cultures and animal models can only approximate the human kidney. ExVive Human Kidney Tissue from Organovo is a replica of the kidney proximal tube created using 3-D bioprinting. It offers drug developers a reliable means of testing for renal toxicity.

Currently, few preclinical tests can determine whether a potential drug is toxic in humans, making investing in clinical testing risky for developers. Identifying renal toxicity early on reduces that risk. More importantly, “you’re really talking about doing no harm to the patients that are going to be in the clinical trial,” says Organovo Chief Scientific Officer Sharon Presnell.

Bioprinting operates on a similar principle to 3-D plastic printing, explains Presnell, but “instead of putting beads of polymer into a printer, we’re putting little aggregates of cells.” Organovo, which won a spot in 2014’s Top 10 Innovations for its ExVive Liver Tissue, produces tissue samples on a contract basis, and pricing can vary widely depending on the number and type of samples a client requires.

The replica kidney tissue could be applied outside of toxicology too, as a platform for experiments on kidney tissue that would not be otherwise feasible, Presnell says.

“It seems to have integrity like a native kidney tissue,” says Caroline Lee, a metabolism and pharmacokinetics researcher at Ardea Biosciences who profiled transport protein expression in the artificial tissue. Lee found that directional transport proteins were oriented correctly along the membrane. “You can see drugs going in the right direction,” she says. “It’s pretty remarkable.”

Unger: Based on quite a novel and bold approach to copying the detailed morphology and function of kidney tissues, this innovation offers major advantages over conventional cell culture methods, which have limited predictive capacity at the tissue level.

Fishman: This technology can be used instead of preclinical animal trials, reducing our reliance on laboratory animals to test new compounds. It also has the potential to transform drug development by better mimicking human kidney biology to test for the renal toxicity of new drugs.