Tag Archives: bioprinting

Organovo Stock Falls after Media Critique, But Future Roadmap Is Bright

Bioprinting Pioneer Battles in the Stock Market as it Looks Ahead to a Major Milestone

Organovo (NYSE: ONVO) is an exciting 3D printing company that has had a volatile ride in the stock market lately. We dig into some of the factors contributing to changes in its stock price.

As we have covered in the past, Organovo specializes in Bioprinting. The company designs and creates functional, three-dimensional human tissues for medical research and therapeutic applications. The Company collaborates with pharmaceutical and academic partners to develop human biological disease models in three dimensions. These 3D human tissues have the potential to accelerate the drug discovery process, enabling treatments to be developed faster and at lower cost.

This savings amounts to a multi-billion dollar opportunity for changing the way Big Pharma discovers drug therapies. Drug companies will be able to test on 3D printed human tissue in a lab before they even embark on the FDA approval process with animal trials, saving hundreds of millions of dollars.

Read: Bioprinting is a Multi-Billion Dollar Pharma Opportunity for 3D Printing

With all of this promise, why does Organovo only have a $700 million market capitalization? 3D Systems and Stratasys are two other public 3D printing companies that boast multi-billion dollar market caps.

Moreover, why did Organovo climb to an all-time high of $13.65 last week, only to crash nearly 40%?

Organovo Stock Chart

Pictured above: ONVO year-to-date stock chart. Click to enlarge.

The answer is two-fold.

First, Organovo is early in its product roadmap, and has yet to realize much revenue.

Second, the price of the stock is being heavily influenced by the media.

Organovo Product Roadmap

In September, Organovo CEO Keith Murphy shared his company’s future roadmap:

  • Development and launch of 3D Liver
    • Scientific proof of concept – April 2013
    • Functional validation: testing against known drugs – December 2013
    • Delivery to KOLs: alpha and beta testing – April 2014
    • Product launch – December 2014
  • Follow on cell assay product launches
  • Multiple additional pharma partnerships
  • Developed disease models
    • Cancer model readouts over 12-24 months: kidney, others
  • Therapeutic tissue proof of concept and path to clinical

Keith Murphy Organovo Keynote

Note that there is a key milestone coming in December to demonstrate functional validation. Organovo has scheduled a retail investor conference for December 5 to discuss product pipeline and revenue potential, partnership model, cash burn and R&D spend, and more.

Read the full agenda in Organovo’s press release.

Be Careful About the Media

Because ONVO has a relatively small market cap and 3D printing is a concentrated industry, one highly negative or positive story can make a difference in the markets.

Case in point: Seeking Alpha contributor Richard Pearson wrote an article called A Very Detailed Look at Organovo on November 19, saying “Investors should therefore expect the share price to quickly return to below $7.00, where it was prior to over a dozen promotional articles on Organovo released in the past few weeks.”

On that day, the stock fell 40%. Luckily for Mr. Pearson, he was shorting the stock as it read in his disclosure.

If you look across Seeking Alpha as one example of a site sharing investment advice, there has been a lot of attention paid to ONVO by contributors. There is even an article entitled Organovo At the Mercy Of The Media.

Seeking Alpha Organovo Coverage

The takeaway is that investors need to be aware of this media-drive volatility and be prepared to have short-term pops and crashes until Organovo demonstrates, or fails to live up to, the achievements set out on its roadmap.

2014 will be an important year for the Bioprinting pioneer!

 

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, the author is long ONVO. Please consult your financial advisor on all investment decisions.

 

Bioprinting is a Multi-Billion Dollar Pharma Opportunity for 3D Printing

Organovo CEO Sheds Light on its Breakthrough Bioprinting Technology and Roadmap Ahead

One of the most exciting and promising applications of 3D printing is bioprinting, the ability to manufacture living human tissue and possibly organs. And one of the most exciting companies in this field is Organovo.

Organovo (NYSE MKT: ONVO) designs and creates functional, three-dimensional human tissues for medical research and therapeutic applications. The Company collaborates with pharmaceutical and academic partners to develop human biological disease models in three dimensions. These 3D human tissues have the potential to accelerate the drug discovery process, enabling treatments to be developed faster and at lower cost.

Keith Murphy, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Organovo, spoke last week at the Inside 3D Printing conference in San Jose, CA.

Keith Murphy Organovo Keynote

Organovo’s NovoGen Bioprinting is based on a scaffold-free bioprinting process. The cellular “bio-ink” is supported architecturally by hydrogel. The hydrogel can later be removed, leaving only the 3D cellular strcture. The system allows deposition of any structure.

“It enables the creation of tissue that is 100% cellular,” said Murphy during his keynote at the 3D printing conference.

Mr. Murphy shared several applications of his company’s bioprinting technology as well as his future roadmap. The key applications are:

  • Vascular bioprinting
  • Tissue patching
  • Drug discovery with incredible savings for Pharma R&D

Creating Human Arteries and Living Tissue with 3D Printing

Organovo has been able to create simulated human arteries that are developed outside of the body using vascular bioprinting. They are viable tissue with layered architecture. These arteries are able to withstand 6 times the normal blood pressure and therefore may be implantable in the human body.

Consider patients who experience trauma or disease and need arterial transplants. 3D printed arteries could be game-changing for this class of surgeries.

With similar technology, Organovo can create living tissue, such as heart tissue, that can be implanted during surgery and thrive with the existing tissue. “We can build tissues that are significant larger than any other approach,” said Mr. Murphy. Before bioprinting full organs can be commericalized, which Murphy hinted may be in the future, simple tissue can be generated and stitched into the body.

Organovo Pink Sheets Secondary 3D Printing

How Bioprinting Can Save Big Pharma Billions

Over the last 15 years, the cost of Pharma R&D has dramatically increased from $15 to $50 billion per year, and yet the number of FDA approvals has remained constant if not declined. See the chart below for a visualization of new molecular entities (NMEs) vs total R&D spend per year.

Bioprinting FDA Approvals R&D Cost

(Source: Discover Management Solutions)

Mr. Murphy knows from his personal experience of working at Amgen for 10 years how much money can go into the development and testing of a potential blockbuster drug only to be rejected during human trials. Some Big Pharma companies spend upwards of $1 billion per drug before final FDA approval. Therefore, the best practice is to speed through animal trials as fast and with as little cost as possible, because the real learning comes during human trials.

This rising R&D cost creates a massive opportunity for bioprinting to give Pharma companies an opportunity to get pre-clinical data on how a drug will work in a human system before even starting animal trials.

This is a multi-billion dollar opportunity.

Organovo creates human cells, for example liver cells, that are deposited and developed into tissue. A disease can be introduced to that tissue in a controlled fashion, and then a variety of independent therapies can be applied. This means that you can outright reject or move along potential drug therapies in a matter of weeks rather than years. Just imagine the hundreds of millions of dollars in savings per blockbuster drug.

Watch the video below for to see Organovo’s process in detail.

The technique of testing therapies on human cells is not new, but Organovo’s approach using 3D printing to generate living tissue is the breakthrough. Organovo’s tissue can live up to 30 days.

“The old rule of thumb in tissue engineering is that you can’t more than 250 microns away from the surface because the cells will die from lack of oxygen,” explained Mr. Murphy, “but we can get to a millimeter by building a capillary structure, getting growth of microvascular networks.

This achievement results in nuanced improvements over what one can get in animal models.

The key applications are Pharma drug discovery and toxicology testing.

Organovo’s Future

Today, Organovo is a public company with a $430 million market cap. But in the next few years, the company could revolutionize drug discovery and tissue therapies.

Keith Murphy, CEO of Organovo, shared his outlook on the company’s future milestones:

  • Development and launch of 3D Liver
    • Scientific proof of concept – April 2013
    • Functional validation: testing against known drugs – December 2013
    • Delivery to KOLs: alpha and beta testing – April 2014
    • Product launch – December 2014
  • Follow on cell assay product launches
  • Multiple additional pharma partnerships
  • Developed disease models
    • Cancer model readouts over 12-24 months: kidney, others
  • Therapeutic tissue proof of concept and path to clinical

 

Related stories:

 

Want to learn more about the evolution of bioprinting? Check out the infographic below, entitled Printing the Human Body.

Infographic Bio 3D Printing

Inside 3D Printing Conference in New York – A Retrospective

Inside 3D Printing Conference Entry

Inside 3D Printing Conference

In a context that felt a bit like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, this week 3D printing went to New York for the first ever Inside 3D Printing Conference.  Over two full days at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, a broad array of industry leaders, innovators, academics and analysts gave keynotes, led seminars, and showed off their latest products to over 3,000 conference attendees.  For many in the crowd, this was a crash course on a technology that has been exploding in the public consciousness over the past two years, and for others it was a chance to network, hear from big names in the industry, and get a sense for where 3D printing will go next.

In a role that seemed fitting given his company’s leadership in the industry and status as the conference’s primary sponsor, 3D Systems CEO Avi Reichental opened the conference with the declaration, “Complexity is free” in a 3D printed world.  Never before, he underlined, has a manufacturing process been indifferent to geometric complexity, and to him this is the single biggest reason 3D printing will continue to grow and expand into sectors ranging from education to medical devices to automotive and aerospace.

Cornell Prof 3D Prints Human Ear

Much of the conference’s focus was on these different segmentations of 3D printing, and breakout seminars throughout the two days took a deeper dive in a variety of subjects.  Some of the more memorable seminars explored integrating 3D printers into K-12 education, topology optimization – a complex but very impressive design tool that appears to be a perfect match for 3D printing, consumer desktop and cloud 3D printing, and bioprinting human tissue for medical applications.  Longtime industry analyst Terry Wohlers and Shapeways CEO Peter Weijmarshausen also gave keynote addresses highlighting their vision for the industry’s future.

Sculpteo 3D Printing

3D Printed iPhone Case from Sculpteo

Outside the seminar room the conference also had a distinctly hands-on element.  A bustling exhibit hall hosted dozens of booths showing off a variety of consumer and enterprise 3D printers along with more curious technologies like 3D scanners and novel CAD input devices.  3D printing service companies were also eager to engage with potential customers, showing high quality parts available for remote ordering online.

While many sides of the industry were highlighted at the inaugural Inside 3D Printing Conference this week, the underlying theme was very clear: while 3D printing technology may have existed in research labs and niche applications since the 1980s and ‘90s, it is only now beginning to truly change our lives in meaningful ways.  And from the number of times speakers said “Nascent,” “Just the first inning,” or “Only scratching the surface” to describe the state of the industry, it is clear that insiders see the eventual impact that 3D printing will make on the world to be profound, far-reaching, and on a larger scale than most casual observers can imagine today.

 

Authored by Brian H. Jaffe, founder of Mission St. Manufacturing and contributor to On 3D Printing.

Read our full coverage on the conference: Day 1 and Day 2.

Inside 3D Printing Conference: Day 1 Top Stories

Inside 3D Printing Conference Entry

Inside 3D Printing Conference: Day 1

Day 1 of the Inside 3D Printing Conference was a big success, with great networking and inspiring speakers. Here are the top stories from Day 1.

3D Printing’s Apple 1 Moment: 3D Printing Conference (Part 1)

“3D printing is in its Apple 1 moment,” said Brian Evans as he showed a photo of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (above). The first Apple 1 was just a circuit board. Customers had to build a plywood case around it. “Who knew that in 30 years we’d all be carrying iPhones?” Evans mused.

Keynote Declares “Complexity is Free”: 3D Printing Conference (Part 2)

Avi Reichental, CEO of 3D Systems, opened this week’s inaugural Inside 3D Printing Conference in New York City with the declaration “Complexity is free.”

3D Systems: Geomagic Design to Advance CAD and 3D Printing

3D Systems announced availability of Geomagic Design, a new suite of affordable CAD design solutions.

Invest in Bioprinting to Get a 3D Printed Ear or New Hip: 3D Printing Conference (Part 3)

Two well-respected speakers in the medical 3D printing field presented today at the Inside 3D Printing conference on bioprinting.

Demo Exhibits Open-Source Complexity: 3D Printing Conference (Part 4)

In a demo at the Inside 3D Printing conference, Brian Evans exposed the complexity of low-cost, open-source consumer 3D design and 3D printing.

Invest in Bioprinting to Get a 3D Printed Ear or New Hip: 3D Printing Conference (Part 3)

Cornell Prof 3D Prints Human Ear

Business Cases for Medical 3D Printing, or Bioprinting

Two well-respected speakers in the medical 3D printing field presented today at the Inside 3D Printing conference.

Cornell Professor Lawrence J. Bonassar, Ph.D.

Cornell Professor Lawrence J. Bonassar presented about “3D Fabrication Technologies for Tissue Regeneration.” We wrote about Bonassar’s research in February when he published the concept of 3D printing a human ear.

In his presentation, Bonassar provided the crowded conference hall with an overview of the key bioprinting motivations and applications.

There are approximately 5 million surgeries per year in the US to replace damaged tissues. This is a huge market opportunity for synthetic, bioprinted implants. His team is already looking at research such as replacing spinal discs, demonstrated in rats and dogs, or growing organic tissue like a human ear.

During the Q&A, Bonassar was asked: “This is great research, but is there a way to accelerate it into the marketplace?” Bonassar immediately responded, “Yes, money. There are certain applications that are ready today but just need funding.”

Investors, are you listening?

Andy Christensen, Medical Modeling

The next speaker was Andy Christensen, owner of Denver-based Medical Modeling, who presented on “Industrial 3D Printing for Medical Devices.”

Christensen shared a wealth of examples and ideas, as well as practical commercial commentary, “The cost of surgery is roughly $100 per minute. That’s a business case for 3D printed medical implants.”

He described the current status of FDA approvals for polymeric systems made using 3D printing and additive manufacturing technologies. There are instrument components being cleared, dating back to dental implant drill guides 5 to 7 years ago. European regulation has historically been easier but that may not last.

The focus ahead will be on personalized surgery and efficiency. One example he described is virtual surgical planning, where a surgeon and engineer walk through a pre-operation plan together with sophisticated 3D models. This can save time, money, and reduce recovery time.

Very interesting presentation and clearly a growth area for investors to get involved!