James McGrath, University of Rochester – Tissue-on-chip technology holds promise to reduce animal testing

On University of Rochester Week: Can computers take over and put an end to animal testing?

James McGrath, William R. Kenan, Jr. professor of biomedical engineering, examines this question

Since 2001, James McGrath has been on the Biomedical Engineering faculty at the University of Rochester and served the department for over 10 years as the first director of the BME graduate program. While historically his research focused on the phenomena of cell migration, since 2007 he has been leading the Nanomembrane Research Group – a highly interdisciplinary, multi-institutional team that is developing and applying ultrathin silicon ‘nanomembrane’ technologies. In 2015 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).

Tissue-on-chip technology holds promise to reduce animal testing

In 2022, the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 removed a provision that required animal testing to be used in drug development and opened the door for computer-based models as an alternative. Then the FDA Modernization Act 3.0 was introduced earlier this year, with the goal further reducing animal testing and increasing efficiency of drug trials.

My current research is focused on developing tissue-on-chip or organ-on-a-chip technology, which is one of the promising alternatives to animal testing currently being studied. In simple terms, human cells are arranged in a microfluidic device referred to as a ‘chip.’ The chip mimics healthy or diseased human tissue and provides an accurate representation of how a specific drug or toxin interacts with that tissue.

Despite their impact and potential, there are important limitations to modern tissue-on-chip technologies. Most data can only be acquired by terminating the experiment, killing the cells, and processing the chip. Thanks to talented multidisciplinary collaborators, we are working on live cell imaging techniques and integrated sensors to provide real-time measurements from inside the chip. Some data from animals will be harder to replicate on-chip in the near future. One of these is biodistribution, or the knowledge of where a drug ends up in the body. This means that despite advances in tissue-on-chip technologies, animal models will continue to be an important part of the drug development processes for years, if not decades.

I expect tissue-on-chip technologies will achieve two worthy goals: reduce the use of animal testing and increase the efficiency and accuracy of pre-clinical data. The chips have the additional advantage of providing high throughput formats that are inaccessible to animal models. This means that not only can tissue chips provide reliable indications that pharmaceutical companies need to help patients, they will allow those pharmaceutical companies to test many more candidates before applying to the FDA for drug approval.