Mattek Midterm Essay

very simplistic in their make-up, licensing to use these chips is not necessary unlike animal testing, which requires a license to use animals in medical or cosmetic trials. The in-vitro chips are more applicable to human research because they are made of human cells. They can test a variety of body parts; lungs, liver, kidney, heart, brain and many other organs and tissues. MatTek’s Epiderm is one of the many cell-based tests to test skin allergies. Harvard West Institute states, “MatTek’s EpiDerm Tissue Model—a 3-dimensional, human cell-derived skin model, replaces the use of guinea pigs or mice, who would have been injected with a substance or had it applied to their shaved skin to determine an allergic response. MatTek’s EpiDerm is also being used to replace rabbits in …show more content…
Studies show that these models can accurately predict the way new drugs will react in the human body. This method will replace the use of animals in exploratory research and many standard drug tests. Human volunteers are one of the most well-known methods for testing products. “Microdosing” provides vital information on the safety of an experimental drug and how it is metabolized in humans before large-scale human trials. Volunteers are given an extremely small one-time drug dose, while refined imaging techniques monitor how the drug behaves in the body. Microdosing can replace certain tests on animals and also aid in screening out drug compounds that are incompatible in humans so that they won’t look towards government-required animal testing. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an advanced brain imaging and recording technique that can substitute primitive experiments where rats, cats, and monkeys have their brains damaged. This modern approach allows the human brain to be studied safely. It can even be specified to the level of a single