An Open Letter to Organovo Shareholders: Organovo Founder Sees Continued Success in Bioprinting
January 07 2020 - 8:00AM
Business Wire
- Keith Murphy, founder, former CEO and Chairman Emeritus of
Organovo, says bioprinting and similar technologies are going
strong and still growing
- Companies in the space are finding support from institutional
capital sources, and those with tools and service business models
are achieving 40%+ per year revenue growth
- Viscient Biosciences, Mr. Murphy’s current company, has already
crossed a major milestone in the application of bioprinting to NASH
drug discovery
- Viscient incorporates into bioprinting additional cutting edge
techniques, including single cell sequencing and bioinformatics
tools
- Major investment funds have expressed support for Viscient’s
approach
Organovo Founder Keith Murphy sent the following letter to
company shareholders:
At the Organovo annual shareholder meeting in September, I heard
a lot of voices asking how Organovo’s technology could help the
company out of its position. Shareholders seemed perplexed that
with $30 million and an incredible technology portfolio, there was
no way forward. I agreed with that sentiment, but also, in my
opinion as a stockholder, Organovo’s failure was a failure of its
Board and management, so I felt that any attempted new effort would
end up in the same place due to the limitations of existing company
leadership.
The good news is that there is plenty to be done with
bioprinting and 3D tissues. Companies in this space are getting off
the ground and funded regularly, and companies with sound
commercial execution are seeing revenue growth consistently at 40%+
per year. My company, Viscient Biosciences, has taken bioprinting
to entirely new levels while using bioprinted tissues as disease
models for drug research, and now has the opportunity to quickly
develop drug candidates in partnership with pharmaceutical
companies.
“Organoids,” which broadly captures the use of 3D tissue models
in disease research, were featured on the cover of the June 2019
issue of Science, one of the world’s premier academic journals.
This was an exciting recognition of the potential in this space.
The use of human cell-based 3D models has the potential to displace
use of animal models in drug discovery, which have led to very high
rates of clinical failures.
At Viscient, we are further advanced than the research reviewed
in Science, and we are in a leadership position in this field.
We’ve taken our disease model and combined it with powerful
technologies like single cell sequencing (see the IPO of 10X
Genomics, whose technology we use extensively). By recreating the
disease outside the body, “in a dish,” we’ve proven now that we can
see novel, actionable results that can lead to new drugs and
significant commercial deals with pharma.
Using the Viscient platform, we have already achieved a major
milestone – the discovery of a novel pathway with a high level of
validation to be involved with a major unmet medical need,
non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). NASH is expected to be a $40
billion revenue opportunity for pharma. There are currently no FDA
approved drugs to treat NASH, yet it is expected to become the
leading cause of liver transplant. We expect to have a drug
candidate to treat the disease pathway we’ve found quickly, and,
given our results and pharma’s interest in NASH, deals with one or
more top 25 pharma companies in the near future.
This combination of the power of 3D bioprinting and drug
discovery is made possible via my partnership with Jeff Miner,
Viscient’s co-founder and CSO. He and his R&D team have built
out a world class platform for novel drug discovery and
incorporated into bioprinting new technologies, including
integrated single cell RNAseq and bioinformatics tools. Jeff and
several of his top team members brought drug discovery expertise to
Viscient from Ardea, their previous success, which sold to
AstraZeneca for $1.25 billion.
Major fund investors in Organovo took a look at what Viscient is
doing and think it is top rate. The combination of using 3D tissues
and single-cell sequencing technologies makes Viscient a leading
innovator, and these are investors that put their money to work
specifically on groundbreaking innovation. The investors told us
that they either were “strong supporters” or that they were “fully
supporting” Viscient. We look forward to leveraging that as we move
to the next level.
Given the successes other companies have seen, Organovo’s
plummeting fortunes clearly are no failure of the technology. I’m
sure you felt the effects of many months of feeble investor
engagement and communication, and the stock price surely did. That
left no room for error, as did the incomprehensible and
indefensible plan to limit a company with a robust platform
technology to a single pipeline program.
For Viscient Biosciences, having investment funds with >$4
billion under management as supporters is a huge positive moving
forward. Our technology crossed a major hurdle in 2019, hitting
what I think is a world first: the validation in 3D liver tissue of
a novel NASH pathway as an important drug target. There is a path
to those funds’ investment dollars, and yours, being used to drive
the continued success of bioprinting through Viscient. I look
forward to finding that path with you in 2020!
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200107005367/en/
Jessica Yingling, Ph.D. Little Dog Communications Inc.
jessica@litldog.com +1.858.344.8091
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