“Organs-on-a-chip” don’t look like much: They are very thin clear pieces of plastic, but when they are filled with cells, they take on a life of their own and mimic human systems far more effectively than simple petri dish cell cultures.
No more animal testing and no more guesswork about whether drugs that work on animals might also work on humans. Scientists are making an entire electonic set of organs that can test our drugs quickly and easily.
A team of researchers in the US are making a whole set of electronic organs on tiny plastic chips for safer, more efficient drug testing.
Getting a new drug on the market is no small feat. On average it takes over a decade of trial and development before a new drug can hit the shelves, and only a fraction of them even make it that far.
This is partly due to the guesswork that goes into using animals for drug testing. While animal testing has played an invaluable role in the development of our drugs in the past, it's a process that is by no means infallible. What might work wonderfully for a rat in the lab won’t necessarily agree with the biology of a human being, and, on the other hand, the perfect drug for humans might never make it past the initial testing stages because it predicts the wrong response in a lab rabbit.
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