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When it comes to pharmaceuticals, testing on animals is a terrible but necessary evil. Life-saving drugs continue to be developed every year, but to reach the market they are subjected to rigorous safety testing to ensure they pose no safety risk to humans. Our current best way of doing this is by testing them in animal models – be it mice, rabbits, or primates.
But what if there was a way we could ensure drugs were safe for human consumption, but harm no animals in the process?
Researchers from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, believe it’s possible – and they’ve already demonstrated it by producing a promising cancer therapy without testing on a single animal. Using a chip with human tissue on it, the researchers believe they can demonstrate safety and efficacy while bypassing the traditional animal testing stage, and have now submitted their new drug to the US Food and Drug Administration for approval. Their results were published in the journal Sci
Bionic chips to replace animal testing for drug development
‘We are now able to insert microsensors that offer us real-time information on how drugs work and when they stop working.’
March 9, 2021, 3:56 pm
Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, right, and team member Aaron Cohen at Hebrew University’s Grass Center for Bioengineering. Photo by Daniel Hanoch
“Human-on-a-chip” technology for rapid drug development without animal experimentation has been introduced by researchers led by Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, director of the Grass Center for Bioengineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and founder of Tissue Dynamics.
The technology itself isn’t new, but Nahmias’s team took it to a new level as described in
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A team of researchers led by Professor Yaakov Nahmias, director of the Grass Center for Bioengineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and founder of Tissue Dynamic, introduced a new technological approach that has the potential to rapidly develop new drugs without the need for animal experiments.
According to Professor Nahmias, Drug development is a long and expensive endeavor that is defined by multiple failures. The main reason for this failure is that clinical experiments are ultimately based on minimal information gained from animal experiment which often fail to replicate the human response.
The primary animals used in drug development are rodents; mice and rats with different genetics, physiology and metabolism than humans leading to a situation where successful therapies in rodents often fail in clinical trials.
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