Organovo Division Samsara Sciences Announces Multi-Year Supply Agreement With Lonza Bioscience Solutions

Organovo Holdings, Inc. recently announced its wholly owned subsidiary, Samsara Sciences, Inc., a provider of highly specialized human liver cells, entered a non-exclusive global supply agreement with Lonza Bioscience Solutions. Under the terms of the agreement, Lonza will market human cell products from Samsara for further distribution to its customers.

“We’re incredibly pleased to begin this partnership with Lonza, which allows us to tap into their outstanding global sales and marketing capabilities and expand the reach of our human cell products,” said Dr. Sharon Presnell, President, Samsara and Chief Scientific Officer, Organovo. “This agreement, which represents Samsara’s single largest contract to date, continues to establish Samsara as an emerging leader in the production and delivery of specialty human liver cells for use by biopharma clients in their research programs. Samsara has more than doubled its sales throughout the past year, and we expect that growing demand for our library of well-characterized healthy and disease-origin cells will continue to provide attractive revenue opportunities for our business.”

“Organovo’s mission to revolutionize how new therapies are discovered, tested, and ultimately delivered to patients begins with high-quality donor cells that are both the building blocks of our complex 3D tissues, and are also foundational elements in our client’s research programs,” said Taylor J. Crouch, CEO, Organovo. “We’re seeing great commercial traction from this segment of our business, and believe it will become a bigger contributor to our revenue mix as we look ahead to fiscal 2019. We expect the Lonza agreement will accelerate the commercial penetration of our cell products in the global biopharma, academic, and research markets. In addition to boosting our top-line growth, Samsara’s leading cell products also continue to support our own R&D mission, including our liver tissue disease-modeling platforms for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and fibrosis, as well as our NovoTissues IND-track liver therapeutic program for the treatment of alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency.”

Organovo is developing and commercializing a platform technology to produce and study living tissues that emulate key aspects of human biology and disease for use in drug discovery, clinical development, and therapeutic applications. The company develops tissue systems through internal research programs and in collaboration with pharmaceutical, academic, and other partners. Organovo’s living tissues have the potential to transform the drug discovery process, enabling treatments to be developed more effectively and with greater relevance to performance in human trials and commercialization. The company’s ExVive Liver and Kidney Tissues are used in disease modeling for NASH and fibrosis, high-value drug profiling, target and marker discovery/validation, and other drug testing. The company is also advancing a preclinical program to develop its NovoTissues liver therapeutic tissues for critical unmet medical needs, including certain life-threatening pediatric diseases. The company has received orphan designation for its potential treatment of alpha-1-antityrpsin deficiency, its lead indication within the category of inborn errors of metabolism. Organovo is changing the shape of life science research and transforming medical care. For more information, visit www.organovo.com.

Samsara is dedicated to the provision of high-quality primary human liver and kidney cells for use in pharmaceutical and academic research focused on human health and disease. Samsara is a wholly owned subsidiary of Organovo Holdings, Inc. For more information, visit www.samsarasciences.com.