LIVERMORE, Calif. – Hoping to make the lab rat a thing of the past, scientists at Lawrence Livermore Lab in this East Bay Area city are testing technology that replicates vital human tissues on microchips.
Animal rights advocates are encouraged that the technology may one day end experiments on mice, rats, snakes and other animals used to test products and develop drugs in laboratories around the world.
The "Human on a Chip" program shifts the experiments from living animals to the lab by replicating cells of human organs and tissues, exposing them to chemicals and using electrical signals to measure the response.
While labs and university researchers in other parts of the U.S. are using similar technology to test different organs of the body, scientists at Lawrence Livermore are focusing on four vital body functions: the central nervous system, peripheral nervous system, blood-brain barrier and heart.
The chips allow scientists, for example, to measure how certain body parts react to caffeine, heart medicine or other more dangerous toxins. In one early experiment, scientists applied capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers hot, to cells of the peripheral nervous system and were able to measure a response.
The cells can survive and function on chips for several weeks in some cases, so many different kinds of experiments can be done to measure how exposure to drugs or chemicals affects cells and to evaluate cell recovery, with no human or animal test subjects necessary.
"Animal testing can be more complicated and costly, whereas these chips can be much more reliable" said Kris Kulp, a lab scientist who is part of the project.
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 9 out of 10 drugs that pass animal tests fail in humans because they don't work or are dangerous. With this acknowledgment, various agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and National Institutes of Health, have made efforts to reduce the use of animal testing.
