Artificial person

The era of artificial people is close, after the new report shows the smooth design of the internal organ design projects in the laboratory.

Significant advances in efforts to create mini artificial people , called 'homo minutus' , were announced at the Society of Toxicology in the United States. Accordingly, experts are nearing the long-term goal: the world's first artificial person with four major internal organs: lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, in a project can completely change the way study the effects of new drugs and the effects of toxins on the human body. Specifically, a group of American scientists said that the artificial liver studied by them reacted almost like real human liver when exposed to toxic chemicals.

Model of artificial person under ATHENA project - (Photo: LANL)

The achievement is the first result of a five-year international effort costing $ 19 million, led by Los Alamos National Laboratory leader Rashi Iyer. This project is called ATHENA , the goal of creating 4 internal organs connected to each other. Each part has a smartphone screen size, which is connected to tubes carrying artificial blood inside a human body. This project received the support of the Defense Threatening Reduction Agency, while similar programs to create small-sized internal organs were also deployed at the Defense Defense Research Projects Agency. Advances (DARPA) and the US National Institutes of Health.

'By developing a ' homo minutus' version , we are gradually eliminating the need for experimental or experimental animals on petri dishes. The benefits, coming from poison analysis and pharmaceutical preparation systems that can mimic reactions like real human organs, are huge , 'ANI quoted ATHENA project leader Dr. Rashi Iyer. . At the present time, up to 40% of pharmaceutical companies conduct failed experiments and there are thousands of chemicals that have not been able to determine their effects on humans. Therefore, providing a reasonably fast and cost-effective testing system like ATHENA can provide real benefits in the medical field, enabling a drastic improvement in the probability of pharmaceutical testing.

Dr. Iyer said the ultimate goal of the project is to make the lungs able to breathe, the heart can pump blood, the liver can metabolize and the kidneys can be excreted.'All are connected by infrastructure that is very similar to how blood vessels connect our internal organs' , according to Iyer team leader. Lead researcher John Wikswo added that they have found a way to build a necessary model that allows experts to measure the response of human liver to pharmaceuticals and poisons, with far-reaching effectiveness when tested on cells grown in petri dishes.