Animal vs artificial: why we need both
- Allie White
- Jan 5
- 5 min read
Writer: Allie White
Editors: Sam Alper, Kayla Harnist, Cambria Jensen
Illustrator: Annabel Anyang
Have you ever popped a couple of Ibuprofen when you wake up with a headache to help you get through the day? Do you get a flu vaccine each year? Have you ever had surgery, like an organ transplant or heart procedure? Have you received anesthesia before?
If you answered yes to any of the questions above, you owe a huge thank you to animal research. Almost every medication, medical procedure, or advancement in healthcare made available in the last century has come from research conducted in laboratories using animal models. Despite this, both the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are trying to pivot away from animal research. Specifically, the NIH, which funds the vast majority of health research being performed in the United States, has announced that future funding opportunities will not be granted to researchers or labs that use only animal models. Meanwhile, the FDA has begun phasing out the use of animal testing for new therapeutics.
Animal Research
Scientific research is conducted using animal models to gain a deeper understanding of the complex inner workings of both humans and animals. This then allows us to pin down the root causes of diseases and disorders, as well as develop effective treatments. Animals make effective models due to their similarity to humans (mice share 98% of their DNA with humans), meaning most things we learn about biology in animal systems can be applied to humans.
Now, I think it’s important to state here before diving into the nuances of this topic that, as a vegan, dog owner, and person who cries at any movie with an animal in it, I am adamantly opposed to any form of animal cruelty. I am a neuroscientist who works with zebrafish. Every day that I walk into the lab, I am faced with a moral conundrum. Would I rather I didn’t have to perform experiments on animals? Yes, of course. However, would I sacrifice the rigor and accuracy of my science, which will hopefully someday be used to benefit human health, by using a different, flawed modeling system? No.
The reduction of harm to animals used in research settings is a fundamental principle guiding the work of scientists. There are strict laws and guidelines that researchers must follow regarding the care and protection of the animals they use in the laboratory. Scientists must also consider and use alternatives to animal experiments whenever feasible. Using alternative methods, such as computer modeling, is a welcome change for me and most scientists I know. However, the transition to using new technologies instead of animal models must be a slow and intentional one; this is not what we are seeing from the current FDA and NIH guidelines.
The NIH and FDA justify their recent move away from animal research and testing by claiming that new technologies, such as computational and human-based models, can replace the need for animal use. They primarily encourage the use of artificial intelligence (AI), organoids, and organs-on-a-chip. These technologies, although full of promise, are not yet mature enough to replace animal research.
Artificial Intelligence
AI has become one of the hottest topics of today. If, like me, you have dabbled in using ChatGPT to complete some of your mundane tasks, you might be pretty blown away by all it can do. However, when it comes to complex scientific modeling and prediction, AI can only do so much. Although it is incredible at processing large data sets and helping scientists do their analysis, we can’t rely on it to run experiments or make complete, informed models with no ground truth (i.e., real data) to compare to. Without the proper data to train on, AI can’t make very accurate predictions, and we are still in the process of collecting that data, specifically, through the use of animal models. In my field of neuroscience, artificial neural networks have come a long way and are helping us better understand our data. However, AI cannot capture the complexity of an entire living organism. It is nowhere near ready to uncover new information about the brain and its function. For that, we need researchers doing hands-on experiments.
Organoids and Organs-on-a-Chip
Researchers could do these hands-on experiments, one might argue, with human-based, non-invasive systems, such as organoids or organs-on-a-chip. If you’ve never heard these terms before, they might sound like they came straight out of a science fiction novel. However, these are real tools that scientists developed to investigate the functions of the human body without having to poke and prod at actual human beings.
Organoids are small clumps of cells that grow on dishes into a specialized type of tissue. They originate from stem cells that are taken from human tissue or blood. These stem cells can form a variety of different types of cells that make up an organ. So, if you take stem cells from a lung and grow them on this special dish, a structure with a similar cellular makeup to your lung will start to form. These organoids can be used to model tissue-specific diseases and to screen new drug treatments.
Organs-on-a-chip are similar to organoids in that they involve taking specialized cells from organs to look at their function, diseases, and potential drug treatments. However, organs-on-a-chip can more closely model the function of these organs. An organ-on-a-chip is an actual object that can fit in the palm of your hand. This object is flexible and has channels running through it where human cells are placed to mimic the structure of an organ. These chips can have different types of tissues that make up an organ within the channels, allowing them to communicate with each other, as they would inside your body. Scientists can also use these chips to make fluids flow along the cells, providing oxygen and nutrients. It can also be physically manipulated, such as stretched to imitate taking a breath in the lungs.
Although organoids and organs-on-a-chip have greatly advanced scientific capabilities, they are still not ready to completely replace animal research. These technologies typically can’t be used in long-term studies, like testing the lasting effects of drugs or studying aging, because they can’t be sustained over time. They also do not encapsulate the full complexity of a living organism. They are great for studying one tissue at a time, but how will we know if a specific drug to treat a liver disease has side effects on other organs if we only test it in liver organoids or organs-on-a-chip?
The Run-Up
All in all, there are remarkable advancements happening in science beyond the animal model world. However, animal research continues to play a significant role in advancing our understanding of the brain and body, as well as in developing effective treatments for diseases and disorders. Animal and non-animal research, when used together, can lead to the best scientific outcomes. There is a place for AI, organoids, and organs-on-a-chip in research. These are phenomenal technologies that we can learn a lot from. But, they must be complemented with animal research to accurately capture the complexity of a living organism. For example, organoids and organs-on-a-chip are excellent tools for screening new drugs. However, if we fail to then test the promising drug candidates found using those technologies in an animal model, we risk overlooking important long-term side effects that could occur in other parts of the body.
To be clear, I fully support a slow transition away from animal research. I would much prefer a world in which we don’t have to use animals for our experiments. But that world doesn’t exist quite yet. We don’t currently have modeling alternatives that can fully capture the complexity of life, and I don’t think we should pretend that we do. I’m not pro-animal research, but I am pro-good science. To achieve the best and most accurate scientific outcomes possible, we can’t completely abandon animal research just yet.
