Humans have an odd relationship with nonhuman animals. Some of them we treasure; others we abuse for all kinds of cruel and heart-breaking experiments. A few years ago, for example, researchers in Texas separated baby mice from their biological mothers and gave them to foster families. Some of the babies stayed with the same foster family during the experiment, while others were moved to new foster parents. At the end of the experiment, the baby mice were killed and their brains examined. The researchers concluded the mice staying with the same foster family were more resilient than the mice being moved to another foster family, thus confirming the obvious, namely that foster children living in a stable environment experience less anxiety and are more resilient than children passed on from one family to the next.

A driving factor for conducting such unnecessary experiments is the enormous pressure researchers face as their institution expects them to publish on a regular basis. With a lot of our tax dollars going toward animal experiments, researchers opt for experiments involving our nonhuman fellow creatures. And when they successfully publish, they get more money for new animal experiments to publish more.

Leaving such unnecessary cruelty aside, it could be argued animal experiments are necessary to benefit humans. After all, we want to ensure cosmetic ingredients and drugs are safe for us, and we also want to learn more about human diseases in order to develop treatment options. But as always, things aren’t that simple. Trying to artificially induce a human disease in a nonhuman body must naturally be doomed to fail. A nonhuman body simply isn’t a human body, and thus is unable to reliably mimic the possible response of the human body to a chemical substance.

Consider research on Alzheimer’s disease, for instance. All the research conducted on various nonhumans animals has been unable to produce a cure. While some drugs have appeared promising in nonhuman animals, they haven’t proven to be successful in humans. And just because a drug works in one species, it doesn’t mean it will work in another. Aspirin, for example, doesn’t harm unborn human babies but deforms the unborn babies of dogs, cats, rabbits, rats, mice and monkeys. Or take penicillin. It helps us humans but kills rabbits and guinea pigs.

What we need is human-based research, i.e., research conducted without nonhuman animal bodies. Fortunately, these days, there are many options to test drugs and chemical substances without nonhuman animals, and unlike animal experiments, the findings in these options are reliable. Let’s look at a small sample.

Human cells, which are easy to cultivate, last for a long time, and divide infinitely, have been very useful in studying tumors, the different layers of the human skin, the human heart, liver or eye. Since 2010, researchers have used three-dimensional cell cultures called “organoids” that are capable of mimicking the functions of various human organs.

Another option are organs-on-a-chip. I encourage you to go online for pictures of them. It’s mind-blowing to think something as tiny and looking as unspectacular has turned out to be such an invaluable research tool. All kinds of organs can be studied in a chip model: lung, skin, brain, tongue, you name it. Lung-on-a-chip models, for instance, help develop new cancer medication, while skin-on-a-chip models allow the testing of cosmetics. There’s also a chip model representing the human organism using cells from the human blood, liver, kidney, stomach, gut, etc., thus enabling researchers to study the human metabolization and the effects of toxic breakdown products on the human body. There are even chips covered with cancer cells to study various cancerous organs. Typically, such tests take months in animal experiments. Conducted on chips, researchers only need a couple of days.

Or take 3D printers. They use human cells to print a copy of an organ, thus realistically mimicking the organ’s various layers, which enables researchers to study basic research questions or to test different chemical substances.

Computer models have also proven to be very efficient. They are much faster and cheaper than animal experiments, and also more reliable. By comparing large amounts of data, algorithms are able to predict the possible toxic effects of a new drug on the human body. This way, pharmaceutical companies can determine possible toxic effects already in the early stages of the drug’s development.

Excuse my language, but this is cool stuff, isn’t it? And this is just a small selection of the possibilities and opportunities out there. In July of 2020, Doctors Against Animal Experiments, a German NGO of which I am a member, launched its database NAT (i.e., Non-Animal Technologies) which includes over 2,150 entries on animal-free research methods), and the database keeps growing. As the website says, “82 new entries (were added) in the past 365 days.”

And the future is going to be even more exciting as animal-free research technologies strive for personalized human medicine. Because a disease progresses differently in each human body, future medicine will be tailored to every single one of us, meaning a patient-on-a-chip will be created out of the patient’s individual cells to find the best treatment for that patient. And no nonhuman animal will have to suffer for that. I can’t wait for this kind of progress to come.

Dr. Daniela Ribitsch, a native of Austria, is a resident of Lock Haven.