3D printed liver "patches" can extend the life of transplant patients for one or two years

Release date: 2017-03-31

In just three years, patients awaiting liver transplantation may be able to donate healthy cells and copy them through a 3D printer into a dollar-sized tissue that can extend their lifespan.

Organic bioprint company Organovo, based in San Diego, has shown that its 3D printed liver tissue patches continue to function when implanted in mice. Then the next study will be human.

It is reported that the company that develops the biological printing process has a history of 10 years and can customize the production of various forms of tissue, including micro-human liver tissue and kidney tissue.

Organovo's 3D printing organization has been used to accelerate preclinical drug testing. Traditional testing and development using animals or small cell samples placed in petri dishes cost an average of $1.2 billion and takes more than a decade. The cost is high, in part because 90% of the drugs do not pass clinical trials in animals and humans, so researchers must continue to study until success.

Organovo's bioprinting technology better simulates the response of human tissue to drugs and helps identify toxic drugs before entering clinical trials. The print tissue is 20 layers thick, including functional blood vessels that more accurately simulate real human tissue.

"When you put liver cells on a petri dish, they never have all aspects of normal human liver biology because they are excluded from the normal background...and liver cells are not as big as in that environment. Most cells," said Organovo CEO Keith Murphy.

The main obstacle to creating an organization is to continue to make the vascular system and provide life-sustaining oxygen and nutrients. Biological cells may die before the tissue falls off the printer.

Bioprinting technology first began commercial use at the end of 2014 to form a network of tissues and capillaries in organ tissue to deliver life-providing blood and better mimic living organs. The blood vessels are composed of three different cell types, stacked about 20 deep or about 500 microns thick. The first is a layer of human fibroblasts, followed by a 250 micron layer of human vascular smooth muscle cells, followed by a thin layer of human vascular endothelial cells.

For a few comments on how thin the vascular system is, please refer to this 100 micron thick paper. So, Organovo has printed the tissue in a thickness of five sheets stacked together.

Organovo's 3D printing organization has been used by 11 of the world's top 15 pharmaceutical companies, such as Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Japan's Astellas Pharma.

According to data released by Merck and Astras at this month's Anesthesiology Conference, 3D printing organizations are superior to traditional drug testing methods.

The company's technology is now being used in small venture capital-backed pharmaceutical companies, which typically only process one or two drug development projects at a time.

Recently, this technology has also shown the potential to use larger therapeutic tissues in transplantation medicine.

Murphy said: "We are now transferring the liver patch directly to the patient for clinical trials. It is still very early in this application, it is not a complete organ, we think we still need a long time to study."

"What we are talking about is how to help most people in the shortest possible time, because we can put this liver tissue on a plate, so we say let us do something with the same technique to implant into the patient's body. "

A liver "patches" produced by Organovo have the size and thickness of the dollar and can be implanted in the body of a patient waiting for a liver transplant.

Murphy said: "What it can do is basically take these patients and carry them for a year or two to make them have better liver function and make them a transplant bridge."

“We have conducted active animal testing and we will put it on patients before 2020,” he added.

In mice, liver tissue patches have long been shown to begin circulating blood 7 days after transplantation and at least 28 days after implantation.

Therapeutic liver patch grafts may be used first in patients with acute, chronic liver failure and pediatric patients. Organovo intends to submit a “Investigation New Drug Application Form” to the US Food and Drug Administration for its therapeutic liver tissue.

According to Organology, the market for therapeutic liver transplantation in the United States will exceed $3 billion.

Organovo is not the only research body that prints human tissue for implant and drug testing.

Last year, the University of San Diego published a report showing that it has successfully printed liver tissue and vascular systems.

The liver plays a key role in how the body metabolizes drugs and produces key proteins, which is why printed liver models are increasingly being used as a platform for drug screening in laboratories.

3D printed liver "patches" can extend the life of transplant patients for one or two years

Other companies have successfully used the patient's own cells to print skin for grafting. For example, MaRS Innovations partnered with the University of Toronto's Office of Innovation Collaboration (IPO) to create a PrintAlive bioprinter to create a machine that prints skin.

The Harvard University Wisconsin Bioinspired Engineering Institute created a 3D printer that can hold four different types of cells simultaneously. The breakthrough in this research was the ability to create blood vessels that can feed living tissue.

Source: 3D Tiger

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