Virtual humanity

Despite the advances that medical science has made over the years, new drugs are still tested in a very low-tech way: researchers give them to animals.

Animal experimentation still plays a key role in a wide range of scientific disciplines. This is hardly ideal. For one, we are not rats, mice or monkeys: we are people.

Just because a dog hasn’t reacted badly to a trial drug, that doesn’t mean that a human tester won’t. Animal experimentation is also expensive and, depending on your point of view, cruel.

Scientists using animals in their work frequently receive death threats and find it increasingly hard to secure private sector funding: anti-vivisection campaigners learned in the 1990s that targeting investors was an effective way of  
limiting research.

The demand for an alternative to animal testing is clear, and researchers from 13 European universities are working on what they believe will be the solution: a computer simulation of the entire human body.

The Virtual Physiological Human Project is being funded to the tune of €72m by the EU. The idea is to bring together the masses of patient-specific genetic data being gathered across European research institutions.

With advances in computing power and information technology, there is the potential to use a human simulation to develop tailored clinical treatments for patients, based on their unique genetic profile.

If it works, the project could revolutionise medical science in the 21st century. And this is not just a long-term goal, the researchers working in this field say.

They expect to make substantial advances in this field over the next ten years in a range of diseases, from cancer to HIV/AIDS. It could mean the end of animal testing and eventually even clinical patient drug trials.

Kelly BéruBé, a cell biologist from Cardiff University, told a recent conference that the advances in this technology were now moving very fast, and offered the prospect of enough quantitative data to allow much greater use of “virtual tests” in the next decade.

Steven Manos, a computational scientist at University College London, agreed that the project will lead to more effective treatments.

But he cautioned that even the most sophisticated computer models represented only a small fraction of the complexity of animals.

Real reduction in the use of animal experimentation would, therefore, be a long-term goal, he said.