A new approach to testing medicines without using animals has become a reality thanks to a team of scientists from Dynamic42, ESQlabs and Bayer, who developed a new three-organ platform based on organ-on-a-chip technology. It can model how medicines are absorbed and metabolized, reducing the need for animal experiments.
The research focused on how medicines cross the placental barrier in pregnant people, a group rarely included in clinical studies for ethical reasons. The system brings together three types of tissue—liver, intestine and placenta—and a built-in pump circulates substances, making it possible to reproduce their natural distribution. The resulting data are analyzed using digital twins, allowing the effects of medicines on the body to be modeled.
The new platform not only helps assess the safety of medicines for pregnant people and other vulnerable patient groups, but, it is hoped, will also become a first step toward ending preclinical animal testing.
