For long, animal rights activists had been demanding a ban on animal tests by pharmaceutical companies that they consider unethical. More often, the animal specimens are not exact replicas of the human biological features and drugs tested in labs on animal specimens always do not produce the desired result in humans.
However, animal testing might soon become a matter of past if chips developed by Professor Jonathan Dordick of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Douglas Clark of the University of California are accepted by the researchers. The product developed by the duo consists of two glass slides. The first glass slide is called the MetaChip that contains an array of little blots containing human liver enzymes. The DataChip is the other glass slide, which, depending on the test, contains blots of bladder or liver or kidney, heart, skin, or lung cell cultures. When pressed together the two chips show the human body’s reaction to the testing compound.
The newly developed in-vitro product is believed to be more efficient than animal testing in labs. At last, a new product has come up that will save animals being butchered in laboratories in an effort to save the human species.
Source: Yahoo!
Image Credit: NTNU
