Could Technology Replace Animal Testing?

Trying potential medical treatments on animals was once the best that science could do, but new technologies could make animal testing obsolete. Learn how in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren vogelbam here. In January of eighteen, US Food and
Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced that the agency, after
an internal investigation, had permanently ended a nicotine addiction study
in which four squirrel monkeys had died. He said in
a statement on the FDA website, based on this team's findings,

(00:25):
it is clear the study was not consistent with the
agency's high animal welfare standards. In a September seventeen letter,
famous primate researcher and conservationist Jane Goodall had announced the
research as cruel and unnecessary, saying that the harmful effects
of smoking on humans are already known and could be
studied directly. In addition to ending the study, Gottlieb said

(00:46):
that the findings indicated that the FDA's protections for animal
research subjects quote may need to be strengthened in some
important areas. For that reason, he announced the launching of
an independent, third party investigation of all of the FDA's
animal research and the creation of a new animal welfare
counsel to oversee those studies going forward. Additionally, Gottlieb said

(01:06):
that the FDA would strengthen its commitment to replacing, reducing,
and or refining animal studies with new methods, and said
that animals should be used in studies only when there's
no other way to do research that's important for public health.
But even so, he said, it is important to recognize
that there are still many areas where animal research is
important and necessary. In particular, he cited the use of

(01:28):
primates as essential for the development of some critical vaccines
for human children. The research involving monkeys and the agency's
response highlighted what for many people is a discomforting reality.
Despite computer simulations and other tools available to today's researchers,
laboratories still use large numbers of animals as experimental subjects,
and an email, FDA spokesperson Tara G. Rabbin said that

(01:51):
the agency currently is utilizing eight thousand, one hundred and
sixty seven creatures of various sorts in research that includes
over seven thousand road two hundred and seventy primates, hundred
and nine fish, thirty one lago morphs, an order that
includes rabbits and hairs, twenty mustella that's animals such as
ferrets and weasels, twelve amphibians, six cows, and five goats,

(02:15):
but that's only a fraction of the animals subjected to
testing in other government, university, and private sector labs. A
sixteen report by the U S Department of Agriculture listed
over eight hundred and twenty thousand animals, including one hundred
and thirty nine thousand rabbits, seventy one thousand primates, sixty
thousand dogs, and eighteen thousand cats, among other animals. Elizabeth Magner,

(02:37):
program manager for the New England Anti Vivisection Society, said
in an email that the most common toxicology tests, which
include oral and dermal sensitization and irritation testing, still cause
thousands of animals to suffer and die in the US
each year, and despite the FDA's position that animal testing
is still essential, there are increasing questions about its scientific value.

(02:59):
Drugs often produce results in animal tests that can't be
replicated with humans, and at least a few drugs that
were deemed safe in animal testing have turned out to
be dangerous or even lethal when taken by human subjects.
The use of animals and research goes back to ancient times,
when Greek physicians did exploratory surgery on live animals to
study their anatomy and physiology. In the early nineteen hundreds,

(03:20):
rodents became a staple of laboratory research after the breeding
of a standard strain, the whist rat. Katherine will It,
director of Regulatory Toxicology, Risk Assessment and Alternatives for the
Humane Society of the United States, explains, when we do
research on animals, it's because a hundred years ago it
was the best thing people could think of. We've learned
that animals are not very good predictors of what happens

(03:42):
with people. But will It and others are hopeful that
animal testing will be replaced by alternatives that will not
only spare animals from suffering, but produce more reliable results
about human effects. One particularly promising technology is the development
of microchips lined with living human cells that enable them
to serve as simulated human organs. Geraldine A Hamilton's, President

(04:03):
and chief Scientific Officer of Emulate Incorporated, explained in an
email how the devices work. She said, each of Emulates
propriety organ chips, such as the lung, liver, brain, intestine,
or kidney, contains tiny hollow channels lined with tens of
thousands of living human cells and tissues, and is approximately
the size of a double a battery. An organ chip

(04:24):
is a living, micro engineered environment that recreates the natural
physiology and mechanical forces that sells experience within the human body.
She said that this technology can predict human responses with
greater precision and detail than modern cell culturing or animal
based experimental testing. According to Hamilton's the devices already are
being used by pharmaceutical companies, and NASA is working with

(04:45):
Emulate to use the company's brain chip in space in
order to better understand the effects of microgravity and other forces.
Organ chips also can be combined in a system to
simulate how multiple organs react to something, and Emulate is
working on the patient on a chip, which eventually will
include organ ships that are tailored with an individual patient's
own cells. Those sorts of developments give opponents of animal

(05:07):
testing hope that it will soon become a thing of
the past. As Elizabeth Magner puts it, we are confident
that this reality is not only possible, but inevitable. Today's
episode was written by Patrick J. Keiger and produced by
Tristan McNeil for more on this and lots of other
forward thinking topics, visit our home planet, tostof works dot com.