Organ-on-a-chip devices recreate human organ function with remarkable fidelity, offering the potential to replace animal testing in drug development and safety assessment.
Organ-on-chip technology represents perhaps the most promising near-term replacement technology for animal use in drug safety testing. The species translation problem — drugs that work in animals often fail in humans — causes both enormous research waste and unnecessary animal suffering. Human organ chips bypass this problem entirely by using human cells in physiologically relevant conditions. The regulatory opening created by the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 removes a key barrier to adoption. Every drug successfully assessed using organ-on-chip technology instead of animals represents both better science and real animals spared from experimentation — a genuine win for both goals.