Through several years’ design and trial, scientists from Singapore developed a new drug test tool which will involve less cost, while being more accurate and fast in getting result. The new platform applies human pluripotent stem cells and carries with an auto machine reporting toxic changes to achieve a fast detecting result of the drug toxicity.
With the present platform, drug’s toxicity can be only checked at the later stage of drug development and some even after the drug has been marketed, thus to find a way that can test if the drug is toxic or not at the very early stage is a better choice for drug design and development. In addition, it has been argued for a long time that using animal for drug tests is cruel and disrespects the animal’s equal right for enjoying lives. In some areas it will be illegal to test cosmetics with animals. With these issues, scientists began the design for a more humane and reliable drug screening platform.
Kidney is the main victim organ of toxicity and it will present the toxicity of drug to a great degree, thus it becomes an ideal target for the detection and scientists choose to develop kidney cells with the human pluripotent stem cells. What out of the expectation of the researchers is that the pluripotent stem cells induced kidney cells can be gained at a high purity. Before this success, acquiring the target cells at a high level of purity was one of the hardest issues during the whole process as the research team previously used other stem cells to produce the cells.
Another shinning point of the newly developed system is that the machine can automatically spy on the injury mechanism and give a result by collecting and analyzing the data it gets, which is the reason that why this new platform can be more fast in giving tests accurate results.
The new platform can be used in various aspects like food and cosmetic industry. And it may help to exempt the hot issue argued all the time-animal right. Moreover the screening platforms can be taken advantage of in the field of reducing water pollution caused by drugs by eliminating the toxicity of them-a new area that the same research team is working on at present.
With the successful practical application of the new screening platform, it may bring a revolution in the field and BOC Sciences will also consider renewing our present screening platform with it for its all benefits.
The paper was published in the journal of Scientific Report and titled as Prediction of drug-induced nephrotoxicity and injury mechanisms with human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cells and machine learning methods with the DOI number being 10.1038/srep12337.