Professor Yaakov Nahmias seen holding the biological chip. (Image Credit: Hebrew University)
I've always had a problem with testing on animals (see my cartoon about it). I know it has been helpful in the past, but I've been hoping to see another way. We are getting closer.
Life-saving drugs are produced every year, but they go through testing in animal models to ensure safe consumption for humans. Now, drug development and testing without animal experimentation have been introduced. Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a biological chip that serves as cancer therapy. It contains human tissue with microscopic sensors that monitor the heart, liver, and kidneys during drug treatment. The team has already submitted this new drug to the US FDA for approval.
This technology has been around for 30 years, but the Israeli team expanded on it by successfully creating a new treatment using a chip to eliminate the need for animal testing. Mice and rats are usually involved in animal testing, which harms them and provides inaccurate results since they have different physiology, genetics, and metabolism than a human.
This illustration shows how the biological chip provides data on how the kidney, liver, and heart would react to a drug. (Image Credit: Hebrew University)
The team used this new technology to prove that cisplatin, an anti-cancer drug, causes dangerous fat buildup in human kidneys. Cyclosporine, an immunosuppressive drug, may also cause liver and kidney problems in patients. These drugs induce nephrotoxicity, which accounts for approximately 14 to 26% of impaired kidney function in patients being treated for kidney damage.
The researchers then combined cisplatin with empagliflozin, a diabetes drug that reduces sugar absorption in the kidneys, and fed it to the chip. This limited the damage to kidneys and other organs by reducing fat buildup. Since these chips could accurately simulate the human body better than animals, the technology could boost drug development accuracy.
To stimulate the drug's ability to interact with humans, the team used human kidney spheroids with microsensors inside to monitor the metabolism of the tissue. With this method, they were able to test their theory and collect real-time results without using animal models.
This marks the first time that the biological chip was used to produce a safe cancer treatment without relying on animal testing, which results in cruelty. If the drug gets approved, it could lead to a reduced number of animals being used in labs.
In the future, animal-free drug testing could become a reality now that drug interaction technologies, including organoids, computer simulations, and more, have come into the picture. Tissue Dynamic, a company founded by Nahmias, plans to carry out clinical trials and get specific drugs approved to treat cancer.
Lots of other "body on a chip" technology out there... there is hope for our fellow living creatures.
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