Laboratory News

Public Pressure Encourages Development of Lab Chips to Replace Lab Rats

Animal rights activists and many in the public have long felt queasy about the usage of laboratory animals to test cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.  Some are taking active steps to put “lab rats” out of work. In Europe, efforts are under way to enact a ban on animal testing for cosmetics companies. Responding to this impending development, researchers have developed a chip that mimics human reactions to potentially toxic chemical compounds.  Developers of the chip hope it may make laboratory testing on animals a thing of the past.

This new chip was developed by Jonathan Dordick, chemical engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute  and Douglas Clark, chemical engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley . It consists of two glass slides.  The first slide, called the MetaChip, has rows of little blots containing human liver enzymes.  The second slide, called the DataChip, contains an identical array of blots which, depending on the test, could be live human bladder, liver, kidney, heart, skin, or lung cell cultures.  Sandwiched together, the two chips mimic the human body’s reaction to compounds.  If the cells die or stop growing, it’s a sign that a toxin is present in the chemical being tested.

Dordick and Clark created a company, Solidus Biosciences, that plans to market the chip by late 2009.  They have received about $3 million in federal money, including grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation  (NSF).  A pharmaceutical company and a cosmetic company are currently testing their chip.

Experts expect the move away from animal testing in favor of in vitro testing, like the chip from Solidus Biosciences, will be a slow process.  Other alternatives to animal testing, such as synthetic skin substitutes and computer simulations, are not nearly as efficient, fast, inexpensive, or easy to manipulate.  In the case of Solidus Biosciences, its chip technology still needs to be validated. It may have limitations when it comes to risk assessment, such as determining if particular doses of a substance pose a cancer risk.

What Dark Daily finds most interesting and significant about this development is that laws and popular pressure against using animals for cosmetic testing were the triggers.  The technology developed by biotechnology companies to emulate living processes for the testing of cosmetics is likely to prove useful for clinical purposes.  This is a demonstration of how trends completely unrelated to clinical diagnostics will lead to advances in diagnostic technology that help clinical laboratory testing.

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