Autodesk is developing CAD tools that can design new blood vessels, liver tissue and other replacement parts for the human body in collaboration with 3-D bioprinter company Organovo. After their recent announcement about the project, the principals from each side have gone into detail about their excitement for the partnership.

The pairing will be a dramatic development for Organovo. Their bioprinters allow scientists to deposit cells and grow functional human tissues for use in medical research. They're amazingly powerful 21st-century tools, but run on software left over from the Apollo era. Every time a scientist wants to print something, they have to write a script from scratch and run it from the command line. Instead of dreaming up new experiments, biologists have been kept busy debugging code.

"We already work at the intersection of enough disciplines that developing software was not something we thought was a good idea," says Keith Murphy, CEO of Organovo. "Having 3-D design software will help scientists get to experiments faster, as well as make it easier for external academic experts to approach the our systems."

Enter Autodesk. The CAD software giant has become ubiquitous in many professional realms, from architecture to industrial design. Meanwhile, their software has been used in the last 17 movies to win the Academy Award for best visual effects, including simulating the lifelike creatures from Avatar. And now with the new partnership, they’re developing programs that will actually create living things by supplying their software expertise to the bioprinter hardware manufacturer.

"Anything that's been designed or built in the last 20 years, from buildings to cars to tables, would likely involve our software, but all of that is dead, inert," says Carlos Olguin, leader of Autodesk's 14-person Bio/Nano/Programmable Matter group. "Life is becoming a nascent design space in an engineering sense. It's subject to specs, subject to QA, it’s repeatable. Biology is becoming an engineering discipline.”

Integration for the partnership will begin in earnest in 2013, but before we see scientific breakthroughs, though, there will be a period of catch up. "In many ways the first project is making a lateral transfer of technology." says Olguin. "The level of maturity for bioprinting software is at the command line. Even if the first version of the software is just the UI, parametric modeling, and tools that have been used for the last 10-15 years in CAD packages, it will represent a huge improvement over the current state of the art."

"Our scientists are very interested in getting to this first step, applications of things that have been traditional in 3-D software." says Murphy. "For example, a challenge we have is that we don't know what tool paths are the best. Using these tools in the design process will help us think through the possibilities and repeat things that work well more quickly."

Olguin believes this will force Autodesk engineers to think differently. "This is different than traditional design process where you can model something that stays in the shape you specify," he says. "With this process, stem cells are deposited layer by layer to create a construct and the designer or engineer sets constraints to create emergent behaviors."

Organovo printers can quickly create tissue samples used in drug discovery or other medical applications.

While this all sounds awesome, the big question remains "When can I print a spare kidney?"

The answer is unsatisfying. Even moderately complex structures, like patches of heart muscles to repair damage from heart attacks are decades out. Still, progress is still being made. "One of the dramatic things we did was to make blood vessels made from a patient's own cells, comprised entirely of human cells, that expand and contract as expected and have reached a strength that's implantable, though they are not yet implanted." says Murphy.

The first "apps" on the Organovo platform will be simple tissues which could be ready for clinical trials in just 5 or 6 years. This is an eternity in smartphone cycles, but is a breakneck pace in healthcare. Until then, Organovo will continue to serve researchers at pharma companies that give the public 3-D printer company a steady stream of revenue, a fact Murphy says is a "fairly novel thing for an early stage life science company."

Organovo also has a strong academic track record including partnerships with Stanford and Harvard along with a string of published papers that have the biomedical community abuzz. Ultimately, Murphy's primary goal is getting more people experimenting. "For me it's allowing greater access to our platform. The bottom line is it needs to be more accessible, faster to more people."

Unfortunately for those who want to play Dr. Frankenstein, it’s unlikely that this software or the Organovo printer will be released for consumers or hobbyists anytime soon. However, Murphy sees a future where Organovo becomes an on-demand resource for the biomaterials community — a sort of Shapeways for skin tissue.

But he puts the whole project into perspective. "If you think about 3-D printing, that market has just hit a tipping point where it can deliver $1,000-10,000 devices that work reliably. We’re on the other side of that curve, closer to punch cards than laptops."

Photos: Organovo