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New Biochips May Eliminate Animal Testing

Posted on: Tuesday, 18 December 2007, 12:00 CST

U.S. scientists have developed two biochips that might eventually eliminate the need for animal testing in the chemical and cosmetics industries.

Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of California-Berkeley and Solidus Biosciences Inc. developed the DataChip and the MetaChip, that can combine to reveal the potential toxicity of chemicals and drug candidates on various organs in the human body.

Traditional toxicity testing involves the use of animals, but with the increasing number of compounds being generated there is a rapidly emerging need for high-throughput toxicity testing.

We looked at the issues facing companies and realized that we needed to develop something that was low-cost, high-throughput, easily automatable and did not involve animals, said Rensselaer Professor Jonathan Dordick, co-founder of Solidus Biosciences Inc., the company that's working to commercialize the chips.

We developed the MetaChip and DataChip to deal with the two most important issues that need to be assessed when examining the toxicity of a compound -- the effect on different cells in our body and how toxicity is altered when the compound is metabolized in our bodies.

The research appears in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: United Press International

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