The Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland has just announced an important partnership with San Diego-based bioprinting technology company Organovo. Research into the biology of cancer, especially how it metastasizes, has been complicated in the past by the limitations of animal models and cell cultures, which really don't tell us enough about the workings of cancer within a human being. Organovo creates living, 3-D human tissue using their bioprinting device, the NovoGen MMX (below). The partnership between OHSU and Organovo will allow cancer research at Knight Institute labs to much more closely model the complex architecture of malignancy within the human body, using in vitro tissue. Ultimately this will lead to the development of more accurate therapeutics and pre-clinical trials.
[The NovoGen MMX Bioprinter, courtesy of Organovo]
Though the news release announcing this collaboration between the world-renowned oncology researchers at OHSU and the cutting edge technology company only describes the use of generic engineered (bioprinted) human tissue, the promise of bioprinting for the future is in creating personalized tissue and eventually whole organs tailored to an individual. In other words, the bioprinted tissue used to test a drug therapy could be your tissue, cultured and printed from your genetic material. Or it could be breast or prostate tissue specifically. Not long from now we could progress from tissue (which is relatively simple) to organ systems, which could be used for research as well as for transplant replacement of diseased organs. For earlier blogs of ours discussing bioprinting, some of the challenges facing the new technology, and inroads to resolving those challenges (such as the complicated matter of vasculature), click here.
"Better research models lead to a deeper understanding of disease mechanisms and more accurate information in the preclinical drug discovery and development process. We believe new technologies, like bioprinting, are important for producing more relevant models of cancer and metastasis to ultimately support the discovery of new therapeutics."
Cancer research funding at OHSU from the National Cancer Institute of the NIH is at $14.3M for the current fiscal year. Labs with over $1M of NCI funding in 2013 include those of:
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