You know we hate animal testing here at Vegansaurus, so we are v excited for Organs on Chips! It’s some kind of SCIENCE that uses human cells on a chip to mimic actual organs…or some such science.
You can read all about it on the Guardian but it has major implications for the animals suffering in labs:
“The organs-on-chips allow us to see biological mechanisms and behaviours that no one knew existed before,” says Don Ingber, founding director of the Wyss Institute. “We now have a window on the molecular-scale activities going on in human organs, including things that happen in human cells that don’t occur in animals. Most drug companies get completely different results in dogs, cats, mice and humans, but now they will be able to test the specific effects of drugs with greater accuracy and speed.”
PCRM has been telling us for years about the scientific shortcomings of animal testing and all the ways it sucks beyond ethical reasons. And then of course there are those pesky ethical reasons! Maybe it’s finally time to get rid of it??
From the lab folk themselves:
The paradigm used by pharmaceutical companies to discover and develop new drugs is broken. Clinical studies take years to complete and testing a single compound can cost more than $2 million. Meanwhile, innumerable animal lives are lost, and the process often fails to predict human responses because traditional animal models do not accurately mimic human physiology. For these reasons, the pharmaceutical industry needs alternative ways to screen drug candidates in the laboratory.
So basically their chip will greatly reduce suffering, be cheaper, and more accurate. Bring it on!
And guess what, it’s getting even more press because it won the Design Museum’s design of the year award!
Watch this vid to learn more. It’s short. Even I watched it.