Exclusive: ‘Everyone told me it would never work’, says professor of nanomedicine, but science needs alternatives to experimenting on animals
Professor of nanomedicine Wojciech Chrzanowski finds it “heartbreaking” to recall some of his early scientific work, where research involving animal testing was inevitable.
Aside from animal welfare concerns, findings from studies in animals are often not even applicable to or reproducible in humans, due to differences in biochemistry and anatomy. Yet it is difficult to gain ethics approval and funding for clinical trials in humans to test the safety and efficacy of drugs and treatments without first proving safety in animals.
“Based on these signals we can say when the lungs are fully matured and are ready to start treatment. It is same as hooking up a monitor to a patient and checking for their heart beat. So this biosensor we developed also helps us observe when, for example, a treatment is working and the injured lung is regenerating.”
“We started building these lungs literally cell by cell, trying to get them as close as possible to the human physiology,” Chrzanowski said. However, there are limitations to Chrzanowski’s model lungs. When testing a drug or treatment on a human, the drug may affect various parts of the body, such as the lungs, gut, heart and brain. This whole-body response is impossible to study using only the model lungs. Chrzanowski hopes to build multiple organs, connect them, and have them communicate and function together.
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