You can now buy your own, tiny, 3-D printed livers. Haven't you always wanted one? Last year, Popular Science visited the 3-D bio-printing company Organovo to see the livers, then in development. Now, the livers—each "roughly" hexagonal in shape and just a few millimeters in size—will be ready for sale to pharmaceutical companies this month. The idea is that companies can use the printed tissue to test whether experimental drugs are safe for human livers.
Meanwhile, Organovo is building the knowledge it needs to print out larger patches of organ-specific tissue, which doctors could potentially graft onto ailing organs in the future. "If you could get to something large enough to get to, for example, 10 percent of an organ's function, it can significantly benefit the patient," says CEO Keith Murphy. Organovo is working on early animal tests for its organ patches. As we reported in 2013,…
