SoylentNews

Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

A team led by engineers at the University of California, San Diego has 3D-printed a tissue that closely mimics the human liver's sophisticated structure and function [sciencedaily.com]. The new model could be used for patient-specific drug screening and disease modeling. The work was published the week of Feb. 8 in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers said the advance could help pharmaceutical companies save time and money when developing new drugs.

"It typically takes about 12 years and $1.8 billion to produce one FDA-approved drug," said Shaochen Chen, NanoEngineering professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. "That's because over 90 percent of drugs don't pass animal tests or human clinical trials. We've made a tool that pharmaceutical companies could use to do pilot studies on their new drugs, and they won't have to wait until animal or human trials to test a drug's safety and efficacy on patients. This would let them focus on the most promising drug candidates earlier on in the process."

Original Submission