Discover the Incoming Business of Human Organs On-Demand

If you want to make a quick mental portrait of 3D bioprinting pioneer, Andras Forgacs, then you can try this: imagine a businessman who holds a Black Angus T-Bone in one hand and a human liver in the other hand.

No, he’s not that kind of businessman, he hasn’t killed anybody and no animals have been hurt.

Au contraire!

Both the steak and the liver have been produced without ripping or slaughtering anyone.

Mr. Forgacs Jr. is a young and promising individual who is leading the 3D bioprinting industry without any signs of slowing down. (Maybe he will be forever young if he succeeds in his plans to build what we eat and what we are.)

Despite his relative youth, he has a long record in health-related projects. For more than six years now he has been in charge of Organovo, a company he co-founded and whose main target is the development of 3D bioprinting technologies. The company has already reached some impressive achievements: by the time of writing this article they are capable of printing human liver tissue.

The printed tissue is a live testbed suitable for drug development and other research processes in the pharmaceutical industry. This product is already filling a pre-existing gap among in-vitro tests and trials with animals and the final trials with humans. It means a better, safer, and quicker development process which is an essential improvement for all mankind.

And… this is happening right now.

The Future of 3D Bioprinting Technology

The Organovo company is the first brick of a whole new manufacturing industry. If you can print liver tissue then it’s only a matter of time we print veins and use blood to create the first working liver… produced completely on-demand and free of any rejection trouble.

But Andras’ vision does not stop in spare parts for humans, he is committed to set the animal community free of pain and slaughtering – or perhaps he is fighting against our guilt and regrets.

Well, moral concerns aside, there is an undeniable thermodynamic reality: under the premise of the current inefficient ways we feed, grow, process, and distribute meat, he and his father (Mr. Gabor Forgacs) founded Modern Meadow. Apparently there are a bunch of very good reasons to start printing meat, I invite you to review their website and discover the whys.

From a state-of-the-art point of view, the more interesting thing about Andras’ companies are their unique position, there are no traces of competition in the horizon… a simple query using Recorded Future’s Temporal Analytics™ Engine about “3D bioprinting technology” shows how Organovo is already positioned in the epicenter of this incoming wave.

But… are Mr. Forgacs’ companies 100% alone?

Organovo is pulling 3D bioprinting technology through their own tailor-made developments but those are based and/or rely on third parties efforts as well: universities, equipment manufacturers. So it’s very likely we’ll see (new) emerging companies around the world competing for a piece of the meat-cake printing business.

The visualization below shows the increasing buzz around the 3D bioprinting trend.

It could be interesting to check how Meadow Technologies and Organovo are connected to its investors and other entities. It is not a surprise to read Peter Thiel’s name on the investors list along some other high-tech investment entities.

Andras Forgacs and his father are building what may become the leading company in a whole new market of high-demand: human components for replacement, genuine spare parts grown from the own receiver’s cells.

Those are reasons strong enough to believe there is a bright future ahead for both companies in the 3D bioprinting space. A future that deserves some monitoring.

Consider yourself warned!