Company Creates Tiny Livers With 3-D Printer to Test Drugs

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A San Diego company has created human liver tissue with a 3-D printer designed to be used by drug companies for testing.

The feat achieved by Organovo may seem like science fiction but more and more researchers and scientists have been examining how 3-D printers can be used to “create” human tissue for research purposes.

The “tiny livers” are “bioprinted” with a specially designed 3-D printer and are composed mainly of three kinds of human liver cells, the company announced this week. In theory the tissue will allow drug companies to test out new medication on liver tissue before they go to human trials.

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The Ugly Cost Of Developing New Drugs — Can We Make It Prettier?

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You have to salute the bravery of Dr. DiMasi and his colleagues. They had to know, when they set upon updating their 2003 study on the cost of developing new drugs, that regardless of the estimate they would produce, few would like it. That did not fail.

In a preview of a forthcoming publication, the economists from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development disclosed on Tuesday that it took $2.6 billion in 2013 to bring a new drug to market. This includes the costs of failures – 92% of compounds were abandoned or did not get approved – as well as the cost of capital on the money spent during the lengthy research process, before it can return a profit. If we add the cost of the post-approval research required by FDA or needed to add claims to the label, the figure rises to $2.9 billion.

We will have to wait for the publication of the manuscript for a detailed analysis, but one can already flag several potential problems:

The data analyzed came from a “randomly selected sample” of compounds provided by 10 pharmaceutical companies. The selection may have

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