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Today on Forbes, how AI and mini organs could replace testing drugs on animals. At Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, researchers have created something extraordinary. Tiny beating lab-grown "hearts," visible only under a microscope. The diminutive innards are called organoids. They can be grown in a matter of days from a patient's own stem cells, and their doctors use them to screen for the best medicine for their condition, sparing months of trial and error. They're also hailed as the future of drug testing, and someday perhaps the end of the lab rat. Animal testing has been mandated by law since 1937, when a new formulation of a common antibiotic had a poisonous new ingredient and killed more than 100 people. Nearly a century later, drugs are still being pulled from shelves because they have toxic effects, even though animal testing showed they were safe. Now, politicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs are pushing for new, more accurate ways to test drugs before they get to human clinical trials, potentially saving lives and billions of dollars in the process. In 2022, a group of scientists ran an experiment with 27 known drug compounds that animal studies had shown to be safe. Some of them had turned out to have toxic side effects and had been pulled from the market after they'd killed people. The researchers tested the 27 compounds on a new technology called "organ on a chip." Similar to organoids, so-called organ chips have clusters of cells embedded in a diminutive electronic device that can simulate an organ's behavior. The researchers found that liver organs on a chip accurately predicted which compounds were dangerous. An advancement that might someday lead to significant cost savings in the extremely expensive drug development process. More accurate testing using organ chips could save the industry over $3 billion a year, the study's authors calculated. On top of safety, cost is another reason to move away from animal testing. Today, pharma companies often spend more than $2 billion to bring a single drug to market, with the industry spending nearly $300 billion a year on research and development. But despite these vast R&D expenditures, more than 90% of drug candidates fail. It's a wasteful process, contributing to the flabbergasting prices of drugs that do make it to market. Animal testing, a first step in the process for many drugs, is a key factor here. It simply isn't as accurate as it needs to be, leading researchers down a multitude of costly rabbit holes and dead ends. A common joke among them is that we're capable of curing nearly every disease in mice. Ali Ashar, CEO of London-based Midos, which is developing a new automated way to grow cell cultures, replicating human cells in a petri dish so you can then test drugs on them, said, "Clearly, we're not getting realistic information from animals because everything that gets to the clinical trial stage has first gone through animal trials and succeeded, right?" Conventionally, cells are often grown manually, which can lead to inconsistencies from one culture to another, making it harder to replicate experiments. Automating the process provides faster and more reliable data while freeing up researchers' time to do more important work. Ashar said that Midos, which was founded in 2016 and has raised a total of nearly $29 million, is selling its cultures to pharmaceutical customers to test treatments for diseases where animal models don't match what happens in people. Organoids and cell cultures are a few of the ways the FDA has proposed eliminating animal testing. Starting with a class of drugs called monoclonal antibodies, which mimic the immune system's natural antibodies and are used to treat everything from cancer to Crohn's disease to COVID. Testing these drugs is difficult because they don't often work in mice and must be trialed on larger, more closely related animals to humans such as monkeys, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars each. But even then, animal tests often produce misleading results on how these drugs will work in humans. For full coverage, check out Alexnap's piece on Forbes.com. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
