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‘Organ Chips’ Could Replace Animal Experiments

Imagining a world where thousands upon thousands of animals no longer suffer in biomedical research and drugs actually help the people they’re meant to save may not be as far off a dream as it seems with the development of ‘organ chips.’

A $70 million research project that will develop transparent silicon microchips with hollow channels that contain actual living human tissue and pumps to replicate organ function is underway and is predicted to provide faster, cost-effective and more accurate results for testing diseases, toxins and pharmaceuticals – all on something about the size of a flash drive.

The ‘Tissue Chip for Drug Testing’ program is being funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

“More than 30 percent of promising medications have failed in human clinical trials because they are determined to be toxic despite promising pre-clinical studies in animal models. Tissue chips, which are a newer human cell-based approach, may enable scientists to predict more accurately how effective a therapeutic candidate would be in clinical studies,” according to the NIH.

While chips are already being used in some areas, this project intends improve upon existing test measures – cell cultures, human and animal testing – and overcome the limits of individual chips by creating and combining multiple chips to emulate the entire human body, in addition to designing software that can control and analyze different functions.