If you can really, truly get liver-on-a-chip to work, it's going to positively change drug testing forever and will be the first huge win for tissue engineering.<p>You can throw away animal models for tox screens forever, and that's great news. It will save vast amount of time and money. By using a much better proxy model for humans (slices aren't organs, they have different rheological characteristics and morphology, but they're a damn sight better than mice), you'll wash out candidates earlier and faster, and hopefully enrich the pipeline.<p>Slowly but surely, and it's good to see steps in this direction.
We need to clone decephalized humans and livestock.<p>With thousands of brainless bodies kept alive on life support, you have test subjects for a limitless number of experiments that would have never been possible before. You also create a never-ending O negative blood supply and organ harvesting program.<p>It the case of decephalized animals, you also get cruelty free meat. And that's how you bootstrap the program and port it to the human model.<p>There would be a lot of political pressure, but this would be a space-age jump in supporting fundamental biological research, supplying renewable body parts and tissues, and keeping us healthy and young.<p>We need to do it.<p>If I ever get Elon Musk money and power, I'm doing this instead of rockets.
Does anyone have a layman-accessible explanation for how exactly this works? My last biology class was freshman year of college, but I find the "body-on-chip" startups incredibly interesting. I take it this is different than "growing" organs via stem cells?
I've heard nearly any implant you put inside body has negative impact and this is also true for titanium implants which is seemingly inert and harmless metal.<p>How many people their body with some industrial chip, I'll never use anything like this unless my life depends on it.