Animal Testing – The Past is the Past
Has the title caught your attention? If it has than it’s probably also performed a function of eliciting an internal response and emotion. Fortunately for you that is not the intent of this essay. The intent of this essay is to ease your anger and explain how animal testing is becoming irrelevant through the use of artificial intelligence(AI) and 3D printing(3DP), destine to be relegated to the history books much like some of the other atrocities of man. Will technology save the cute little pink nosed long ear bunny rabbits? I’ll lay out some of the prospects I’m familiar with for saving “Bugs Bunny” and those less fortunate on the evolution chain to let you decide.
Artificial Intelligence(AI) has gotten a pretty bad rap over the years which can largely be attributed to the motion picture industry and non-fiction reading section. Though admittedly still scary, AI does have great potential in a host of applications with drug and chemical testing being one of them. The “AI” model currently used to replicate animal and even human testing is referred to as computer learning. This model of AI requires an input of data, in this case years of drug and chemical testing data on animals and humans, to form correlations of chemical interactions, effects and associations. It’s essentially a learning process for the machine at which some point the machine starts to make its own determinations and conclusions. A team of researchers including Johns Hopkins University toxicologist have applied this model to hundreds of chemicals yielding positive preliminary results.
“Simple” RASARs(Read-Across Structure Activity Relationships) obtain cross-validated sensitivities above 80% with specificities of 50%–70%. This is on par with the reproducibility of the respective animal tests.”
What they are saying in laymen terms is that the results of the testing thus far are comparably accurate to animal testing and in some cases better.
Now let’s step into my realm with 3D Printing(3DP). 3DP is the process of using computer generated data, to create 3 dimensional objects in a layering process. Think of it as printing hundreds or thousands of images on top of one another to form an object. 3DP is enabling a technological golden age across industries including healthcare. Companies and researchers across the globe are now printing live tissue sample, skin and organs. A 3D Bioprinter has even been sent to the International Space Station(ISS) to study the effects and/or benefits of printing organs and tissue without the effects of gravity, “The main idea is to use microgravity as a co-factor of bioprinting technology.”. This process also has the benefit of being engineerable for an infinite number of conditions. Seeing as how 3DP works in layers this is akin to the invention of sliced bread.
Now, combining the approach of using AI and 3DP should be the natural evolution of the technology and science. Once the AI has enough information the hope is that it will create solutions possibly on the bounds of our comprehension. This information can then be transferred to a 3D printer for creation of the verification tissue while the chemical formulations are automatically manufactured, possibly on another “3D printer”. Notice I said “VERIFICATION” tissue and not testing tissue. Our Artificial Intelligence has already take care of that if it’s even needed at that point.
This is promising technoscience but is it enough to break the reliance on atrocious animal testing? How much testing and how much data will we need to convince ourselves that this is a better method? Does this technology raise other ethical boundary questions? How many more years will this take? These are all very valid questions and questions that keep me awake at night with my day job. These are also questions that I cannot answer. Rhetorical as they say. What I will say is that I believe the prospects are good much like this side of history. Will we save “Bugs Bunny” through technology only to be overrun and attacked by killer bunnies in the future? I hope you have a more positive outlook than when you started reading.
Works Cited
Warner Brothers Cartoons. Bugs Bunny. Warner Brothers Cartoons, 1930-Present. Print, Film, Television
Thomas Luechtefeld, Dan Marsh, Craig Rowlands and Thomas Hartung. Machine Learning of Toxicological Big Data Enables Read-Across Structure Activity Relationships (RASAR) Outperforming Animal Test Reproducibility. Society of Toxicology, 2018. Print and Web: https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/165/1/198/5043469
Editor: Michael Johnson. Three-dimensional Bioprinting in Space. NASA, 2019. Web: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/b4h-3rd/it-3d-bioprinting-in-space/