Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group

Liver on the chip devices with the capacity to replace animal experiments

Reporter: Irina Robu, PhD

In the recent years, there is a growing perception that animal experiments fail to predict human responses which indicates the development of other models to predict drug toxicity. The main challenge in replacing animal experiments is that the human cells have a low survival rate when they are outside the body. Researchers at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology in Germany partnered to create a liver-on-chip device mimicking human physiology. In addition , they use nanotechnology based sensors to the living tissue to identify toxicity.