Organovo learned to print kidney tissue

3D bioprinting is no longer the future, but the present. With the help of modern technologies and devices, such as 3D printers, specialists of Organovo can create structures from living cells. It can change modern medicine completely and completely.



Last year, in November, the company announced that the liver it had printed turned out to be a good project. This liver lived for about 40 days, and with its help. according to Organovo, you can test drugs. Unfortunately, such organs are not suitable for human transplantation, but, most likely, in the near future this will be possible. In the meantime, the company introduced a new project - printed kidney tissue.



As far as one can understand, the specialists will use the created structure in order to study the properties of medical preparations. This will significantly speed up the process of creating various drugs and technologies that should help patients with kidney disease. In the USA alone, there are 25 million people with various kidney diseases.





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The advantage of such a kidney is that it can live for more than two weeks. Current samples, which are used by pharmaceutical companies to test their drugs, live no more than a couple of days. Now in laboratories usually use a monolayer from the cell culture of the organ for which research is being conducted. The printing of the organs of Organovo gives into the hands of physicians much more reliable samples, on which a large amount of research can be carried out.



The technology of creating an artificial kidney is called exVive3D tissue, by analogy with the exVive3D Liver artificial liver. Both types of organs were created using NovoGen, the organovo proprietary three-dimensional bio printing system. The kidney will receive commercial use in the second half of 2016.







Despite the fact that Organovo-created organs are now suitable only for medical research, this technology is a cornerstone for the technology of creating organs that are already suitable for human transplantation.