Progress on a better alternative to animal testing

The problem with medical discovery, testing, and delivery? Animal testing often fails to predict clinical responses.

This means drugs that look promising in animal studies often fail to deliver in human clinical trials. In fact, one study found that more than 86% of drugs found to be safe and effective in animal studies fail to get FDA approval.

Photo credit: Columbia Engineering / SWNS

Even worse, no one knows how many drugs that fail in animal studies could actually have cured human diseases.

A new Nature Biomedical Engineering article reports on the creation of what may eventually lead to a replacement for animal testing. It discusses the development of a multi-organ tissue chip that contained four tissues: heart, bone, liver and skin. The four were selected for their distinctly different properties and their importance for modeling diseases and testing drugs.

Scientists around the world spend years developing human tissue chips, also known as microphysiological systems, using bioengineered tissues that mimic organ functions to permit the modeling of human physiology in vitro. While several researchers have successfully developed single-tissue chips, they have limited utility for developers of medical therapies. 

Why? Because drugs usually affect more than one kind of tissue. A multi-organ tissue chip enables researchers to assess how a new drug would interact with a variety of tissues, better emulating what occurs in a human body. Here’s the thing about the human body: it’s complicated. You would need different chips even for one organ, such as the lung. For example, researchers would need distinct chips to test drugs for asthma, pulmonary fibrosis or pulmonary edema.

Since multi-organ tissue chips are still in development, no practical alternative to animal models exists -- yet.

But this will change. Researchers understand the limits of animal testing. Though they rely on animal models because these models often exhibit phenotypes or characteristics that appear to be similar to those of a human disease, they also know the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms can be different.

That problem would not exist with human tissue chips.

The chips would more accurately predict how therapies will affect human bodies. And that should speed the development and introduction of new therapies. It should also allow researchers to avoid wasting up to seven years of clinical trials that only end up demonstrating that a particular medicine is ineffective or, worse, dangerous.

Let’s be honest, as an organization whose mission is to make 90 the new 50 by 2030, we have no time to waste on inefficient research. To find cures for aging and age-related disease, we need to streamline the research process to identify the most promising therapies as quickly as possible. Human tissue on a chip holds great promise. Our new initiative, Bioengineered Patient Trials, will accelerate a new era of personalized medicine that will change the face of modernized healthcare.