Artificial microorgans: a microfluidic tool for in vitro assessment of toxicity

“...after 80 years of reliance on animal testing as the ‘gold standard’ in ADMET testing ... the time has come to develop a new gold standard based on ‘artificial microorgans’ assembled in microfluidic systems.” Today, the costs of bringing a new drug from target to the market vary between US$500 and 2000 million [1]. A major part of this money is spent on evaluating the safety of a new compound by toxicity tests in preclinical and clinical trials. Notwithstanding, since the year 2000 alone 18 approved drugs were withdrawn from the market by the US FDA due to safety reasons...