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As the Trump administration phases out the use of animal testing across the federal government, a biotech startup has a bold idea for an alternative to animal testing: non-sentient “organ bags.”
R3 Bio, based in the Bay Area, has quietly pitched the idea to investors and internally industry Publications As a way to replace laboratory animals without the ethical issues that come with live organisms. This is because these structures would contain all the typical organs, except for the brain, making them unable to think or feel pain. Co-founder Alice Gilman says the company’s long-term goal is to make human clones that can be used as a source of tissue and organs for people who need them.
For Immortal Dragons, a Singapore-based longevity fund that invests in R3, the idea of substitution is a fundamental strategy for human longevity. “We believe that replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” says CEO Boyang Wang. “If we could create a headless, unconscious human body, that would be a great source of organs.”
Right now, R3 aims to make monkey organ bags. “The benefit of using models that are more ethical and limited to organ systems is that the test can be more meaningfully scalable,” says Gelman. (The name R3 comes from the philosophy in animal research known as three t– Substitution, Reduction and Optimization – developed by British scientists William Russell and Rex Burch in 1959 to encourage human experimentation.)
New drugs are often tested on monkeys before being given to human participants in clinical trials. For example, monkeys have played a crucial role during the COVID-19 pandemic in testing vaccines and treatments. But they are also an expensive resource, and their numbers in the United States are dwindling after China banned the export of non-human primates in 2020.
Animal rights activists have long sought to end research on monkeys, and one of seven federally funded research facilities across the country has halted the research. He pointed out They will consider closing and moving to a haven amid mounting pressure. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also End monkey researchwhich is part of a larger trend across government to reduce reliance on animal testing.
As a result, Gilman says, there are no longer enough research monkeys in the United States to allow for the necessary research should another pandemic threat arise. Enter organ bags.
In theory, organ bags offer more advantages than existing ones Organ models on chips or tissuewhich lacks the full complexity of entire organs, including blood vessels.
Gelman says it is indeed possible to create organ bags in mice that lack a brain, although she and her founder John Schlöndorn deny that R3 made them. (For the record, Gelman doesn’t like to use the term “brainless” to describe organ bags. “It’s not missing anything, because we designed it to have just the things we want,” she says.) Gelman and Schlöndorn didn’t say exactly how they plan to create the human and monkey organ bags, but they said they are exploring a combination of stem cell technology and gene editing.
It is plausible that organoids could be grown from induced pluripotent stem cells, says Paul Knopfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis. These stem cells come from adult skin cells and are reprogrammed into an embryonic-like state. They have the ability to form in any cell or tissue in the body and have been used in creation Fetus-like structures That looks like the real thing. By editing these stem cells, scientists can disable genes needed for brain development. The resulting embryo can then be incubated until it grows into organized organ structures.