New Biotech Viscient Partners with Organovo on Fatty Liver Disease

It struck me as a little perplexing when Organovo (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ONVO]]) announced in April that CEO Keith Murphy was departing to pursue “entrepreneurial opportunities.”

The San Diego company, founded a decade ago on 3D bio-printing technology developed by the University of Missouri’s Gabor Forgacs, appeared to be gaining momentum on multiple fronts. Organovo had built a thriving business under Murphy as a contract research organization, enabling big pharmaceutical companies to screen on pea-sized samples of 3D-printed liver cells. In a related initiative, Organovo began moving to develop larger “patches” of 3D-printed human liver tissue for potential use in transplantation in patients with fatal liver disease.

The company also was developing separate lines of business in bio-printing 3D samples of kidney cells for screening pre-clinical drug candidate on living human kidney tissue, as well as 3D-printed skin tissue for evaluating cosmetic products.

So why leave a good thing?

As it turns out, Murphy said he saw an opportunity to develop new drugs for treating non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and other types of fatty liver disease by forming a new biotech with Jeffrey Miner, a scientific director at San Diego’s Ardea Biosciences and AstraZeneca (NYSE: [[ticker:AZN]]), after the pharmaceutical giant acquired Ardea for over $1.2 billion in 2012.

“My whole plan was always to be a serial entrepreneur,” Murphy said.

Keith Murphy

The new biotech, San Diego-based Viscient Biosciences, is announcing today that it plans to collaborate with Organovo to help establish a disease model for fatty liver disease in bio-printed 3D liver samples. Understanding the progression of fatty liver disease and the development of new drugs was previously constrained by

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.