Improving human quality of life with drug treatments is a complicated issue. Drug certification, including drug safety and reliability, entails a long series of tests and government approvals before the drug is available for anyone to use. Testing drugs is challenged by ethical and biological concerns.
Testing new drugs on humans is usually part of a clinical trial and occurs near the end of a drug's path to public use. Before that point, a large amount of testing has been conducted on animals. There is a growing call to phase out animal testing, partly because of the differences in animal and human biology.
Simply put, just because something works for mice doesn't mean it will work for a human being. A group of academic researchers across institutions have joined forces with Virginia Tech's Jeff Schultz to find a solution that could give human-oriented results with synthetic tools. Their approach requires no human subjects or animals.
Instead, it uses new technologies to create testing environments that are highly customizable. Drugs can be tested with cells, not creatures. Funded by a $1.
8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the team includes: Amrinder Nain, professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech Rafael Davalos, Margaret P. and John H. Weitnauer Jr.
Chaired Professor at Georgia Tech Seemantini Nadkarni, associate professor, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital Jeff Schultz, co-founder of 3D-printed microfluidics com.