Clarkson University Prof. Gabor Forgacs was among executives present to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange Monday morning to celebrate the ?New York Stock Exchange listing of their bioprinting technology company.

Forgacs, executive and scientific director of Clarkson's Shipley Center for Innovation and Czanderna and Shirkey Professor in Physics, is scientific founder of Organovo, a San Diego-based biotechnology company focused on delivering breakthrough three-dimensional bioprinting.

Forgacs is a pioneer of bioprinting, a novel engineering technology to build tissues on demand. He is also the scientific founder of Modern Meadow, a biotech company focused on commercializing tissue engineering technologies for the ethical fabrication of animal products.

Forgacs was on the physics faculty at Clarkson from 1986 to 2000, returning to Clarkson in 2009, after joining the faculty of the University of Missouri-Columbia as the George H. Vineyard Professor of Biological Physics, where he continues to do research.

Organ printing work was begun there in 2004-2005, when a $5 million National Science Foundation Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research grant was awarded to a multi-institution team led by Forgacs.

The first patent application for the NovoGen bioprinting platform, Self-Assembling Cell-Aggregates and Methods of Making the Same, was filed by Forgacs and others during the same time frame. In 2007, Organovo Inc. was incorporated with the intent to license the Forgacs patent suite and launch a 3D bioprinting company.

Organovo designs and creates functional, three-dimensional human tissues for medical research and therapeutic applications. The company is collaborating with pharmaceutical and academic partners to develop human biological disease models in three dimensions. These 3D human tissues have the potential to accelerate the drug discovery process, enabling treatments to be developed faster and at lower cost. In addition to numerous scientific publications, the technology has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Time, The Economist, and numerous others.

There is more at http://www.organovo.com.

A YouTube video of the NYSE ceremony is available at http://youtu.be/jqCvThm17cg