Alternatives to animal testing are finally taking off

willmeyers

As slow as it may be to adopt, it's a welcome change to how people should do research. Why induce suffering on an animal when the potential for failure and or miscalculation is so high? It seems from the article a model/chip can be more insightful on how something will affect humans.

sandworm101

Funny animal research story: University had an animal research committee to which anyone wanting to "use" an animal on university property had to submit proposals. Theatre department wants to "borrow" a lamb from the school's agricultural department research herd. Female character was to hold a live lamb during several stage scenes. Three shows a week for about a month. Everyone laughed. Then came the objection: As the lamb would be exposed to uncontrolled people/pathogens it could not be used for further scientific studies nor returned to the herd. There was doubt it could even be sold for food. So, absent anyone taking it home as a pet, its appearance on stage was more of a death sentence than any scientific study! They opted for a doll.

persedes

Nice to see TissUse getting a shout out :) the FDA wanted data from organs-on-a-chip or some comparable alternative. This is the main takeaway from the article imho and great news! ~15 years ago those systems were were not very interesting for pharma companies (bayer used to have a campus a few s-bahn stops away) due to regulators requiring animal tests over those systems.

Aboutplants

Ah lest we forget about Jevons Paradox. With the ability to discover a nearly infinite number of potential breakthroughs, we are going to need more animal testing than ever! (Sarcasm but also some potential truth)

greenavocado

This was already figured out and built out years ago https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/microphysiological-s...

_doctor_love

“It’s people man! We’re the ones who are miserable, so why shouldn’t we get to try it all first?!” - Sealab 2021

groceryheist

In the next 18 months it will come out that Anthropic and/or OpenAI have killed ~1,000,000,000 mice to RL train models for drug discovery. May these model/chips be widely available and cheap enough soon!

tippa123

What makes it more complicated is that regulatory authorities across different countries have varying views on what is considered 'acceptable'. As mentioned in the Harvard example from the article. This could mean that both animal and non animal testing will be required for the forceable future to satisfy both sets of views until there is sufficient alignment from the 'big' regulators imo.

Spacecosmonaut

The dirty little secret of human organoid models is that they are grown in a matrix (e.g. Matrigel) that is derived from a tumor that secretes this matrix, which is grown in a mouse host. The mouse of course is "sacrificed" to harvest this matrix.

superkuh

The massive increases of medical research spending to useful outcomes directly track the decrease in testing in humans and then animals. False positives from doing research in systems that are not the systems the medicine will be used in results in the observed waste and lack of progress compared to, say, the 1950s. I am not saying we should not have stopped directly testing in humans or animals. But I am saying that the result has been worse outcomes. And any further shifts away from the biological systems that need the medicine (like using computational crap like LLMs) will further increase this disconnect.

Andr2Andr

Honestly I don’t get it. Why use a model of organs when you can use real organs in mice? If society had to choose: cure one extra disease variant and sacrifice a million mice in the process, or don’t. Shouldn’t the answer be obviously to use mice to save people lives? Honestly I don’t get it. How many lab rats is one person worth? Judging by some comments here, the answer would be they won’t trade mice lives for people lives?

suncemoje

IMO the most interesting research in this field is being done by DeepMind, which is to build an actual virtual cell [1]. Would be curious to know if the team / Demis is still finding adequate time to advance this field amidst the LLM boom. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEOOMYxMvY4 (Note: I have heard Demis Hassabis speak about this topic in a few sources, this was the quickest one I could find where he talks in depth about it)

boredumb

Very odd.... two months ago now I just bought a lazer cutter and some random acrylic off amazon to make little microfluidic devices because I thought they were neat and have some ideas to make them more generalized that i wanted to tinker with. Nice to see one pop up at me unexpectedly on an HN link.

RoshanAmble

I think one of the more egrigious cases that this could help avoid in the future is Neuralink using UC Davis's monkeys

narrator

Meanwhile, in China. https://faunalytics.org/animal-research-in-china/

throwawayk7h

The suffering of test animals is a tiny decimal point compared to the suffering of factory farmed animals, which produce 99% of the animal products humans eat. Literally 50 billion chickens a year in the most inhumane conditions imaginable for their entire lives. Over one billion pigs per year. They die in horrible 9/11-like conditions. Edit: I used to dismiss all that since I figured animals don't have enough neurons or intelligence or whatever for their pain to matter. A quote from Ozy Brennan[1] (five paragraphs down from this hyperlink, though BB's commentary here is important too) changed my mind. TL;DR: intelligence is almost certainly not relevant to feeling pain, and the same pain pathways that exist in the human brain exist in other animals too. [1] https://benthams.substack.com/i/151605056/2-intensely-what-a...

jrflo

*for drug trials. I imagine animal testing will remain required for implants, surgical instruments, and imaging for quite a long time.

PaulHoule

Whenever i go all the way to the east coast I run into these guys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_crab And because of the unusual nature of their blood they can be used to test the bacteriological safety of injectable drugs. I remember an exhibit about them at the Boston Children's Museum because it was a big deal in Boston because of the pharma industry concentration in the area. A test that didn't require collecting blood was developed circa 1985 but for quite a few reasons the industry has been slow to adopt it and the anticipated transition is still an anticipated transition.