In my opinion one of the most exciting areas in 3D Printing is that of bioprinting. Organova which is a NASDAQ traded company is the leader in this field. They claim to be on the road to print out an entire functioning Human Liver sometime this year. Also promising though, is the potential for 3d printed human tissue which can be used for clinical trials. Imagine being able to have an unlimited number of samples that are pristine to work with in the lab during clinical studies to get FDA approval. It could speed up the approval process significantly.



Well Organova will be helping many drugs with testing shortly, and well as other clinical studies. They announced today that they have teamed up with the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and the National Eye Institute (NEI). Both will work with Organova to develop printable eye tissue.

"Researchers who develop new therapies for patients are too often hampered by animal models and traditional cell culture models that are poor predictors of drug efficacy and toxicity in human beings," says Keith Murphy, Organovo's Chief Executive Officer. "Our 3D printer creates living human tissues that more closely reproduce in vivo human tissues. In collaboration with NIH, which has worked to highlight and address the critical need for better models that can lead to better drugs, we hope to create tissue models that give researchers a much more accurate view of how drugs will behave in human beings before those drugs ever enter clinical trials."