A mouse can be an excellent mouse. It can live a blameless life, satisfy every protocol, and still offer the wrong answer about a person. Keith Murphy has spent much of his career in the expensive interval between those two species. His preferred witness is a small piece of living human tissue, assembled in three dimensions and asked to show its work.
The idea sounds theatrical because the machine has a printer in its name. Yet Murphy's argument is practical. Drug development is full of choices that become costlier with every step: which target deserves attention, which molecule should advance, which signal is real, which apparent success belongs only to a model. If living human tissue can improve one of those choices before a clinical trial, a small object can carry a large economic consequence.
Murphy arrived at this thesis through the unfashionable route of accumulating operating experience. He studied chemical engineering at MIT, worked at Alkermes on a long-acting human growth hormone program with Genentech, then spent ten years at Amgen. For four of those years he was global operations leader for denosumab, later marketed under the names Prolia and Xgeva. The work put him inside the machinery of serious drug development, where science, manufacturing, regulation, and organizational patience meet without necessarily becoming friends.
01 / The all-in wagerA safe job, a strange printer, and terrible timing
In 2007 Murphy founded Organovo. He later described leaving a well-paying corporate job and putting his entire life savings into the company as the biggest professional risk he had taken. The financing effort then collided with the 2008 financial crisis. This is the sort of timing that gives a business plan an unwanted second reviewer.
The underlying technology was unusual enough without a frozen capital market. Murphy co-invented the NovoGen MMX bioprinter, a system designed to place living cells into three-dimensional structures. An office printer puts ink on paper. This one arranged what Murphy called bio-ink: cells deposited in patterns that could mature into tissue. The ambition was broad, but the early commercial task was narrower. A frontier invention needed a job.
“The key is connecting with buyers that are alive to new possibilities.”Keith Murphy, on finding an early market for new technology
Those buyers were not people waiting to order a replacement organ. They were pharmaceutical researchers who already had a painful problem: laboratory models often failed to predict what would happen later in people. Organovo developed small liver and kidney tissues for research, built partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, and went public in 2012. Murphy led operations until 2017. The company's achievement was partly technical and partly grammatical. It helped give customers a useful sentence in which “bioprinting” could appear.
He was also careful about the distance between the day's capability and tomorrow's cover story. In a 2014 video call with seventh graders, he explained mini-livers and drug testing, answered questions about cell sources and printed blood vessels, and warned that whole organs were nowhere close. It is a good founder anecdote because nobody had asked him to shrink the dream. He simply separated the dream from the deliverable.
02 / The second companyWhen the printer stops being the plot
Murphy left Organovo's operating leadership in 2017 and started Viscient Biosciences with Jeffrey Miner, an experienced drug-development executive. The new company kept 3D tissue but changed the center of gravity. The printer was no longer the protagonist. The disease model was.
Viscient's work combines 3D human tissue with molecular analysis. Cells from human donors are assembled into a model, healthy and diseased tissue can be compared, and differences in gene activity can point toward targets. Researchers can then interfere with a target or apply a compound and watch what changes. Murphy has described the process in the plain language of a funnel: many possible targets enter; some fail; a smaller number deserve a drug program.
The human-tissue decision loop
The restraint is as important as the promise. A sophisticated tissue model does not need to replace every early experiment to matter. Its best position may be later, when a research team has narrowed the field and the next choice begins to consume serious time and money. Murphy's sales lesson from Organovo survives inside Viscient's science: give the novel thing a specific decision to improve.
His 2020 description of the work carried both confidence and contingency. He said the company believed it was discovering the next step in drug development and expected more predictive models to improve clinical success rates. In the same breath, he acknowledged that surprises could delay the plan. Biology, unlike a pitch deck, retains final edit.
03 / The translation jobEngineering precision meets living mess
Murphy is routinely described as an entrepreneur and investor, but engineer may be the more revealing label. Bioprinting lives at a peculiar border. The machine places material with mechanical intention. The cells then interact, organize, and behave in ways that must be measured rather than commanded. It is manufacturing with opinionated ingredients.
That border also demands translation. Murphy has explained the field to investors, pharmaceutical teams, schoolchildren, conference audiences, interviewers, and members of Congress. In 2017 he testified before a House subcommittee, using the familiar image of printer ink to explain how cells are layered into living tissue. The analogy is imperfect, as all useful analogies are. Its job is to get the listener across the first bridge.
A former colleague's recommendation captures the range required. Greg Bisconti called Murphy intelligent and passionate, able to discuss complex biology and Organovo's technical details while remaining comfortable in a crowd. Murphy's own answer to a question about inspiration adds another clue. He named Organovo scientist Sharon Presnell and praised her combination of vision, scientific wisdom, practicality, and technical depth. People tend to reveal their operating values when complimenting somebody else.
“One major learning is that we need to stay focused on our major goals, keep our edge to be ahead of innovation, and trust in our IP strength to take care of the rest.”Keith Murphy, reflecting on the bioprinting journey
Focus is an interesting creed for a platform that invites almost limitless applications. Liver, kidney, lung, cancer, toxicology, disease modeling, regenerative uses: every branch can sparkle. The management problem is choosing which sparkle deserves payroll. Murphy's career has been an extended negotiation between a very large destination and a sequence of smaller, testable claims.
Drug-development and operations roles at Alkermes and Amgen.
Founded and led Organovo through early financing, partnerships, and its public-company chapter.
Founded Viscient to use 3D human tissue and multi-omics for drug discovery.
Returned as executive chairman to the company now called VivoSim Labs.
04 / The returnTwo companies, one persistent argument
In 2020 Murphy returned to Organovo's board and became executive chairman. The company later adopted the VivoSim Labs name and the Nasdaq ticker VIVS. By 2026 he was executive chairman directly overseeing operations, while continuing as Viscient's founder, chief executive, and chairman. The arrangement brings his first company and second company into close proximity, including shared facilities, equipment, services, and personnel disclosed in public filings.
The corporate structure may be intricate, but the intellectual line is straight. Murphy has argued for years that human 3D models can improve the evidence available before a drug enters people. The terminology has evolved toward New Approach Methodologies, or NAMs. The pitch has become less about the amazement of printing and more about the usefulness of a human-relevant simulation.
He has carried the argument beyond company walls. Murphy is co-chair of the advisory board at No Patient Left Behind, a nonprofit concerned with biomedical innovation and access. He has also served on the board of the California Life Sciences Association. These roles place him in a second translation problem: how an industry explains the price, risk, duration, and public value of developing medicines.
What emerges is not a tidy founder parable. Organovo's path included leadership changes, strategic turns, and the demands of public markets. Viscient's work still has to progress from better-looking evidence to successful medicines. A model earns authority slowly. It must reproduce known outcomes, survive skeptical use, and ultimately help make choices that fare better in the world outside the dish.
05 / The small objectA better-timed answer
Murphy once predicted that bioprinting would grow to parallel genomic sequencing in scope and number of applications. It is a broad forecast from somebody whose practical lesson has been to narrow the work. The tension is productive. A platform can hold a huge future while a company selects one useful present.
That present is not quite science fiction. It is less cinematic and more consequential: a candidate rejected before a costly study, a target promoted because diseased human tissue responds, a trial designed with a better sense of which patients may benefit. The object on the bench can be measured in millimeters. The saved detour can be measured in years.
Murphy's career keeps returning to the same polite provocation. Before spending more money asking whether an idea works in people, let human biology enter the conversation. Give it structure. Give it time. Then listen closely, especially when the answer is no.