Biochips Devised To Help Cut Down on Animal Testing

The use of animals to test chemicals, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals is under fire from all sides of the argument.

In the United States, pending legislation, increased ethical concerns, and the need to decrease research costs are forcing cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies into frenzy to find a fast, accurate, inexpensive alternative to test the toxicity of chemicals in their products that does not use live animals.

In a study published December 17, 2007, in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY, USA), the University of California at Berkeley (USA), and Solidus Biosciences, Inc. (Troy, NY, USA) have developed two biochips, the DataChip and the MetaChip, that combine to create what could be an inexpensive alternative to animal testing to develop new chemicals, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.

The combined lab-on-a-chips reveal the toxicity of more than 1,000 chemicals or drug candidates on various organs in the human body, and whether those substances will become toxic when metabolized in the body, all in one experiment without the use of live animals. The device, according to the researchers, can also be modified to replicate the metabolism of a specific individual, providing insight into how a specific drug would affect different individuals--an important step on the path to personalized medicine.

Companies worldwide are increasingly looking for these new technologies due to European Union (EU) legislation planned to take affect in 2009 restricting cosmetic companies from using animals in testing for chemical toxicity, which is known as the 7th Amendment. At the same time, the new EU "Reach” legislation, which took affect in June 2007, stipulates that a large fraction of new chemicals undergo accurate toxicity analysis. Toxicology tests on animals are just too expensive for a majority of chemical companies.

The new technology developed by the researchers is an important step to eliminating animal testing in the chemical and cosmetic industries. It could create a way for companies to evaluate ground-breaking new chemicals and active ingredients that they could not previously explore because of the prohibitive cost of animal testing and lack of an effective alternative. According to the researchers, these companies now are limited to moving around the same chemicals that they know are safe and not branching off into new chemicals.

The technology could also drastically cut the use of animal testing in the development of new pharmaceuticals. Currently, detailed toxicity screening does not come into the drug discovery process until later, when significant time and money have been invested in a compound by a company. By introducing the chips early in the process, the researchers believed that pharmaceutical companies would be able to rapidly and accurately determine the toxicity of a drug ingredient, saving time and money on expensive animals testing and clinical trails.

At the moment, approximately 70% of drugs that make it to clinical trails fail due to issues with toxicity, according to co-lead author Dr. Jonathan Dordick. Moreover, approximately 25% of drugs that fail in clinical trails passed animal testing with excellent marks. "Animal testing does not always provide information that translates to predicting the toxicity of a compound or its metabolites in a human,” Dr. Dordick said.

Ultimately, the researchers believe these chips could reduce the percentage of failed drugs and save drug companies millions.


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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
University of California at Berkeley