Tech to Replace Animal Testing Is Almost Ready. Scientists Are Not

What happened

Seventeen years ago, cell biologist Donald Ingber and his colleagues at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering submitted a paper to the journal Science describing their model human lung. It was smaller than a USB stick and made of a clear polymer slab containing narrow channels, which were lined with the type of cells that line a lung’s air sacs and blood vessels.

This lifelike movement was a dramatic change from previous generations of lung models, which typically used static cultures of lung tissue that were unable to simulate the movements essential to lung function. When exposed to inflammatory proteins and bacteria, Ingber’s artificial lung reacted much as living lungs would.

And exposure to silica nanoparticles used to model the effects of ultrafine particulates revealed that movement affected how tissues absorbed them. Donald Ingber led the team that developed the first human lung-on-a-chip at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute.