An In-Depth Look at Organovo
For those following the progress of Organovo, a business-focused review: "In the classical approach to tissue engineering, cells are seeded and grown in a biocompatible matrix designed to direct cell differentiation and function. Scaffoldings play an important role in providing the cell architecture for structure and migration, as well as enabling the diffusion of vital nutrients and expressed product. Unfortunately, there are challenges that exist with the classical approach. Scaffolds, made from both natural and synthetic polymers, must be engineered to degrade at a rate in which the cells within them deposit and build their own extracellular matrix. Scaffold choice, immunogenicity, degradation rate, toxicity of degradation products, host inflammatory responses, fibrous tissue formation due to scaffold degradation, and mechanical mismatch with the surrounding tissue are key issues that may affect the long term behavior of the engineered construct, and directly interfere with its primary biological function. Additionally, scaffolds may elicit adverse host responses and interfere with direct cell-cell interaction. To get around the challenges of classical tissue engineering, Organovo has developed the first 3D bioprinter, called NovoGen MMX. The NovoGen MMX Bioprinter is a novel, fully automated, hardware and software platform developed to fabricate three-dimensional (3D) primary human or other living mammalian cells into tissue, with tremendous cellular viability and biology that is superior to even an animal model. Organovo's NovoGen MMX mechanical extruder enables the fabrication of three-dimensional tissue constructs in a wide variety of geometries (tubular structures, networked sheets, etc...). The speed and precision of this instrument enables the production of small-scale tissue models for drug discovery as well as various drug absorption and toxicology assays. NovoGen MMX works similar to an inkjet printer, in where cells are printed in tiny spheres; essentially 'bio-ink'. The concept of bioprinting relies on the demonstrated principle that groups of individual cells will self-assemble to generate aggregates, through the actions of cell surface proteins that bind to each other and form junctions. Furthermore, if two or more compatible self-assembled aggregates are placed in close proximity, under the proper conditions they will fuse to generate larger, more complex structures."
Link: http://seekingalpha.com/article/817361-an-in-depth-look-at-organovo