00:00Today on Forbes, how AI and mini-organs could replace testing drugs on animals.
00:07At Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, researchers have created something extraordinary.
00:13Tiny, beating lab-grown, quote, hearts.
00:16Visible only under a microscope, the diminutive innards are called organoids.
00:22They can be grown in a matter of days from a patient's own stem cells,
00:25and their doctors use them to screen for the best medicine for their condition,
00:29sparing months of trial and error.
00:32They're also core to the future of drug testing, and someday, perhaps the end of the lab rat.
00:38Animal testing has been mandated by law since 1937,
00:41when a new formulation of a common antibiotic had a poisonous new ingredient,
00:46and killed more than 100 people.
00:49Nearly a century later, drugs are still being pulled from shelves because they have toxic effects,
00:53even though animal testing showed they were safe.
00:56Now, politicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs are pushing for new, more accurate ways to test drugs
01:03before they get to human clinical trials, potentially saving lives and billions of dollars in the process.
01:09In 2022, a group of scientists ran an experiment with 27 known drug compounds that animal studies had shown to be safe.
01:18Some of them had turned out to have toxic side effects and had been pulled from the market after they'd killed people.
01:23The researchers tested the 27 compounds on a new technology called, quote,
01:28organ-on-a-chip.
01:30Similar to organoids, so-called organ chips have clusters of cells embedded in a diminutive electronic device
01:37that can simulate an organ's behavior.
01:39The researchers found that liver organs on a chip accurately predicted which compounds were dangerous,
01:45an advancement that might someday lead to significant cost savings in the extremely expensive drug development process.
01:52More accurate testing using organ chips could save the industry over $3 billion a year, the study's authors calculated.
01:59On top of safety, cost is another reason to move away from animal testing.
02:04Today, pharma companies often spend more than $2 billion to bring a single drug to market,
02:10with the industry spending nearly $300 billion a year on research and development.
02:15But despite these vast R&D expenditures, more than 90% of drug candidates fail.
02:21It's a wasteful process, contributing to the flabbergasting prices of drugs that do make it to market.
02:27Animal testing, a first step in the process for many drugs, is a key factor here.
02:33It simply isn't as accurate as it needs to be,
02:36leading researchers down a multitude of costly rabbit holes and dead ends.
02:40A common joke among them is that we're capable of curing nearly every disease, in mice.
02:47Ali Afshar, CEO of London-based Midos, which is developing a new automated way to grow cell cultures,
02:53replicating human cells in a petri dish, so you can then test drugs on them, said,
02:58quote,
02:58Clearly, we're not getting realistic information from animals,
03:02because everything that gets to the clinical trial stage has first gone through animal trials and succeeded, right?
03:09Conventionally, cells are often grown manually,
03:12which can lead to inconsistencies from one culture to another,
03:15making it harder to replicate experiments.
03:17Automating the process provides faster and more reliable data,
03:22while freeing up researchers' time to do more important work.
03:25Afshar said that Midos, which was founded in 2016 and has raised a total of nearly $29 million,
03:31is selling its cultures to pharmaceutical customers
03:34to test treatments for diseases where animal models don't match what happens in people.
03:40Organoids and cell cultures are a few of the ways the FDA has proposed eliminating animal testing,
03:45starting with a class of drugs called monoclonal antibodies,
03:49which mimic the immune system's natural antibodies
03:52and are used to treat everything from cancer to Crohn's disease to COVID.
03:57Testing these drugs is difficult because they don't often work in mice
04:00and must be trialed on larger, more closely related animals to humans,
04:04such as monkeys, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars each.
04:08But even then, animal tests often produce misleading results
04:12on how these drugs will work in humans.
04:14For full coverage, check out Alex Knapp's piece on Forbes.com.
04:21This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
04:23Thanks for tuning in.
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