What's With Organovo?

You may recall Organovo? They're a bioprinting startup that is attempting to 3D print a variety of biological tissues, including Actual Human Organs! They say: 

 

Organovo's powerful NovoGen Bioprinting platform creates human tissues starting with any cell source. From disease models to tissue creation, bioprinting solves urged needs in biological research.

 

Their goal is to bioprint whole human organs, but they've been surviving by bioprinting simple tissue on scaffolds used for drug testing. This hasn't been vastly profitable, as far as we can see: their most recent financial statement indicated they suffered a USD$4.4M loss in 2011, somewhat worse than their 2010 loss of USD$1.3M. 

 

So why are we concerned with Organovo? 

 

In the past few weeks their stock price has risen sharply from the near penny-stock range of $1.50 to just under $10. Why has their stock risen by a factor of six?

 

The media coverage has exploded in recent days, including articles from sbdn, Investment U, The Atlantic, Seeking Alpha and KapitallWire. Even the White House has said a few words about it, with VP Joe Biden saying, "It’s literally around the corner."

 

What's going on with Organovo? We see only that they've hired a new chief strategy officer, Dr. Eric Michael David and prior to that had beefed up their management team slightly. 

 

Do you know something we don't know? 

 

Via Google Finance and Organovo

Comments

[Formly]

ONVO is starting to look a lot like a pump-and-dump operation.