Future of Engineering
Friday, March 21, 2008
Lab Rats Could be Replaced by High-Tech Alternatives
Medical advances ranging from polio vaccines to artificial heart valves owe a debt to lab rats, mice, rabbits, dogs monkeys and pigs. These Animals are still routinely used to test the toxicity of chemical compounds.
The lab rat of the future, however may have no whiskers and no tail — and might not even be a rat at all. With a European ban looming on animal testing for cosmetics, companies are giving a hard look at high-tech alternatives like the small, rectangular glass chip professor Jonathan Dordick holds up to the light in his lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The chip looks like a standard microscope slide, but it holds hundreds of tiny white dots loaded with human cell cultures and enzymes. It's designed to mimic human reactions to potentially toxic chemical compounds.
Could these chips, already going by the moniker "lab-on-a-chip", replace the mice and other guinea pigs that are regularly used for testing?
Not so fast, says the research community. Animal testing also still has an essential role in making sure new pharmaceutical products are safe and effective for humans. Animal studies generally are needed before the federal FDA approves clinical trials for a drug. So no one expects the chips to totally replace animals just yet. At the same time, even in the near future the ability of these chips and other emerging alternatives to flag toxins could spare animals discomfort or death. At the end of the day, it is likely that you will have fewer animals being tested.
Alternatives to animal tests include synthetic skin substitutes and computer simulations. But in vitro products show the most promise because they can are efficient, fast and easy to manipulate. So expect more and more of preliminary testing to be done in-vitro, literally meaning "in glass".
Read a detailed story on this topic @ MSNBC here
The lab rat of the future, however may have no whiskers and no tail — and might not even be a rat at all. With a European ban looming on animal testing for cosmetics, companies are giving a hard look at high-tech alternatives like the small, rectangular glass chip professor Jonathan Dordick holds up to the light in his lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The chip looks like a standard microscope slide, but it holds hundreds of tiny white dots loaded with human cell cultures and enzymes. It's designed to mimic human reactions to potentially toxic chemical compounds.
Could these chips, already going by the moniker "lab-on-a-chip", replace the mice and other guinea pigs that are regularly used for testing?
Not so fast, says the research community. Animal testing also still has an essential role in making sure new pharmaceutical products are safe and effective for humans. Animal studies generally are needed before the federal FDA approves clinical trials for a drug. So no one expects the chips to totally replace animals just yet. At the same time, even in the near future the ability of these chips and other emerging alternatives to flag toxins could spare animals discomfort or death. At the end of the day, it is likely that you will have fewer animals being tested.
Alternatives to animal tests include synthetic skin substitutes and computer simulations. But in vitro products show the most promise because they can are efficient, fast and easy to manipulate. So expect more and more of preliminary testing to be done in-vitro, literally meaning "in glass".
Read a detailed story on this topic @ MSNBC here
Labels: Bio-engineering, Computer-Science, Society
PermaLink - Lab Rats Could be Replaced by High-Tech Alternatives posted by Ecacofonix : 12:42 AM
