Samsara Sciences, a subsidiary of Organovo Holdings and a provider of highly specialized human liver cells, has 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 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 over the last 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.”            

Taylor Crouch, chief executive officer, Organovo, said, “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. 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.