The end of animal testing and clinical trials: Computers to simulate immune responses.
In case you care about the welfare of all those poor mice whose immune systems are worked on for our benefit, news from the Times Online says that the new research will be done exclusively with computers.
Scientists are predicting an end to the era of human and animal drug testing, saying that computer models will one day become so advanced that they will be able to predict the body’s response to various substances.
The use of computer models would bring “unprecedented benefits” to medicine, and possibly even dispense with the need for drugs altogether, as doctors discovered ways to prompt the body’s own immune system to react to threats, rather than introduce artificial remedies, they said. Read the whole article.
(Forgive the Star Trek theme the last couple of days. I don’t know what’s come over me.)