They're one millionth the size of a human organ, but they're perfect for testing new drugs.
It costs an estimated $868 million to $1.24 billion to develop a drug, according to research published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology. But the real price tag is even higher when you consider how many drugs are pulled from shelves because current in vivo and in vitro testing models can't adequately predict whether or not the substance could be toxic to humans.
But a tiny new innovation could solve this problem in a gigantic way.
Medical researchers from the Wake Forest School Institute for Regenerative Medicine and The Ohio State University have developed an intricate system of microscopic organ replicas—including the liver, heart, lungs, blood vessels, testes, colon, and brain—to improve pharmaceuticals testing currently being performed on animals or in petri dishes. The full system, fit with multiple organs, was then embedded onto a computer chip.
It's being touted as the most sophisticated lab model of the human body, and has the potential to reduce or eradicate animal testing altogether. The full study appears in the scientific journal Biofabrication.
"We tried to make the organs very much related to how they look inside of you, very similar to how they would look on the macro scale if we were implanting them into you," study coauthor Anthony Atala, chair and institute director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, tells Popular Mechanics.