Lab robots are the future for toxic testing

Salvation is near for the legions in the small and furry brigade, scientists are looking to develop a method for testing toxic chemicals on robot subjects.

The benefits of testing potential toxic chemicals this way is both the reduction of animals exposed to often painful or fatal tests but it’ll also reduce costs significantly of conducting them.

Researchers from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institute of Health have initiated a five-year research program to look at the potential of robots to test the effects of chemicals on individual cells.

“Ultimately, what you are looking for is, does this compound do damage to cells?” said Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. “So could we, in fact, instead of looking at a whole animal as our first line of analysis, look at individual cells from different organisms of different animals with different concentrations of the compound?”

The automatons could well be able to carry out 10,000 tests every single day, the current methods achieve between 10 to 100 animal studies each year!

There are presently more than 2,000 chemicals are currently being studied to see if they pose toxic threats to humans.

Collins said. “Although that (animal testing) approach has given us valuable information it is clearly quite expensive and time-consuming, it uses animals in large numbers and it doesn’t always predict which chemicals will be harmful to humans.”

Via Science Journal

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