Topic
Microfluidic devices and engineered tissue cultures that mimic human organ function, used in drug and disease research as alternatives to animal testing.
Harvard's lung-on-a-chip has nearly 5,400 citations since 2010, but most non-animal test methods have yet to be rigorously tested, IEEE Spectrum reports. Validation means head-to-head runs against animal experiments, so animal data remains the yardstick for now.
Reality
A Science Advances platform pairs a tonsil-derived lymphoid organoid with a vascularized bone marrow chip whose endosteal and perivascular layers let researchers image human antibody-secreting cells at resolutions living human marrow will not allow.
Reality
A repurposed retroviral shell protein lets a culture report its own gene activity again and again instead of once, so a single well becomes its own before-and-after control, at population-average resolution.
Reality
Sydney researchers 3D-printed six patients' diseased carotids, lined them with cells and flowed human blood through to watch clots form and shed. It is proof-of-concept, aimed at recurrent-event cases.
Reality
Columbia researchers report a multi-organ chip in which breast cancer cells in vascular flow colonise engineered bone and lung differently, matching known organ tropism.
Reality
The startup opened a robotic "human data center" near San Francisco on the thesis that AI drug discovery is limited by causal human experiments, not model capacity.
Reality