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A relevant aside: there are some companies and startups that aim to replace a good chunk of animal testing with in silico testing. Here's one that my fund is an

A relevant aside: there are some companies and startups that aim to replace a good chunk of animal testing with in silico testing. Here's one that my fund is an investor in called VeriSIM: https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2019/08/14/verisim-life-uses-ai-powered-biosimulations-to-replace-animal-drug-testing/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2019/08/14/veri...

iancmceachern 4y ago
And also some companies (not really a startup but a huge established company) working to replace human transplants with organs "donated" from pigs, on an industrial scale.
marcosdumay 4y ago
If in silico was an alternatives, everybody would have switched already. And everybody will switch as soon as it becomes one. Everybody wants in silico models. If you are using that to argue that alternatives exist, you are unknowingly lying. They will probably exist some day, and everybody will use them without you having to ask.
- lpolovets 4y ago
  Not sure why you're accusing me of lying, I just said that there are companies working on this. I think the key thing here is that while eliminating 100% of animal testing is an ambitious -- and perhaps ultimately unreachable -- goal, data and computer simulations can make testing more effective. If you use data to prioritize animal tests, or in some cases conclusively predict if some test won't any have value (e.g. the dosing is toxically high or ineffectively low) then that is a win. Both in terms of reducing animal tests, and in terms of speeding up drug development and making it less costly.
lofatdairy 4y ago
VeriSIM seems to be targeting drug discovery, rather than drug testing. I don't think scientists regularly use animal models for drug discovery, if at all, because it's really not that efficient (animals aside, you'd have to synthesize a dose of everything you want to try, which is non-trivial). With drug discovery, what you need to do is just shotgun a bunch of molecules and test that they're even bioactive, let alone therapeutic (you don't even need to find all the bioactive molecules, just yield enough for further testing). For actual testing, there are also microfluidic systems and organ-on-a-chip systems that are a field of active research. I think most researchers are more confident in these systems than in-silico (even though organ-on-a-chip systems are a field of active research and have their own shortcomings) because biological systems are active on several different physiological scales, and simulating all of these is rather rough around the edges to say the least. C elegans and fruit fly simulations are still the target of research, and I think fruit flies aren't simulated accurately from the cellular level (though if anyone knows better let me know). Simulating anything more complicated is likely to require either enormous computational resources as well as actual discovery, since you'd need to first characterize everything before you can simulate it.

iancmceachern 4y ago

And also some companies (not really a startup but a huge established company) working to replace human transplants with organs "donated" from pigs, on an industrial scale.

marcosdumay 4y ago

If in silico was an alternatives, everybody would have switched already. And everybody will switch as soon as it becomes one. Everybody wants in silico models. If you are using that to argue that alternatives exist, you are unknowingly lying. They will probably exist some day, and everybody will use them without you having to ask.

lpolovets 4y ago
Not sure why you're accusing me of lying, I just said that there are companies working on this. I think the key thing here is that while eliminating 100% of animal testing is an ambitious -- and perhaps ultimately unreachable -- goal, data and computer simulations can make testing more effective. If you use data to prioritize animal tests, or in some cases conclusively predict if some test won't any have value (e.g. the dosing is toxically high or ineffectively low) then that is a win. Both in terms of reducing animal tests, and in terms of speeding up drug development and making it less costly.

lofatdairy 4y ago

VeriSIM seems to be targeting drug discovery, rather than drug testing. I don't think scientists regularly use animal models for drug discovery, if at all, because it's really not that efficient (animals aside, you'd have to synthesize a dose of everything you want to try, which is non-trivial). With drug discovery, what you need to do is just shotgun a bunch of molecules and test that they're even bioactive, let alone therapeutic (you don't even need to find all the bioactive molecules, just yield enough for further testing). For actual testing, there are also microfluidic systems and organ-on-a-chip systems that are a field of active research. I think most researchers are more confident in these systems than in-silico (even though organ-on-a-chip systems are a field of active research and have their own shortcomings) because biological systems are active on several different physiological scales, and simulating all of these is rather rough around the edges to say the least. C elegans and fruit fly simulations are still the target of research, and I think fruit flies aren't simulated accurately from the cellular level (though if anyone knows better let me know). Simulating anything more complicated is likely to require either enormous computational resources as well as actual discovery, since you'd need to first characterize everything before you can simulate it.