In the news
6 Sep 2008
1 August 2006
Dr Hadwen Trust welcomes the Smart Petri dish
The Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research welcomes news from the journal Langmuir, that scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a new “Smart” Petri dish which could rapidly screen new drugs for toxic interactions, or identify cells in the early stages of cancer circulating through a patient’s blood. The dish could speed up the development of potential new drugs and do so by cutting the use of animal testing – which also makes the test more predictive and reliable.
Traditionally, toxicity tests are performed on rodent and non-rodent animals to assess the safety of new drugs. Animal toxicity testing is not only cruel, it is also time-consuming, expensive and too often inaccurate or misleading.
The smart dish uses nano-engineered silicon crystals to quickly detect subtle changes in the size and shape of liver cells if they encounter toxic substances. The dish was developed using rat cells, but the scientists admit that it could easily use human liver cells instead, and in fact this would be scientifically preferable.
Sangeeta Bhatia, a professor of bioengineering at UCSD now at MIT, who participated in the study, said: “This is important because we know that the enzymes that metabolise drugs — the P450 family — are very different in animals and humans. This is one of the reasons why many drugs clear animal testing but end up toxic in patients.”
