WHY COMPUTER SIMULATIONS SHOULD REPLACE ANIMAL TESTING FOR HEART DRUGS
By Elisa Passini, Blanca Rodrigues, Patricia Benito. March 26, 2018.
Safety is imperative before new medicines are given to patients – which is why drugs are tested on millions of animals worldwide. But research shows computer simulations of the heart have the potential to improve drug development for patients and reduce the need for animal testing.
Animal testing has, to date, been the most accurate and reliable strategy for checking new drugs, but it is expensive, time consuming and highly controversial. There is also the potential for some side effects to be missed due to the differences between animals and humans. Drug trials are particularly problematic for this reason and it’s clear that new testing methods are needed.
Small differences between animal and human cells are amplified when a patient takes a drug. That limits the results of animal testing to an accuracy rate of around (75%-85%) and also leads to drug withdrawals from the market because of cardiovascular safety issues.
However, recent research demonstrates that computational models representing human heart cells show higher accuracy (89-96%) than animal testing. It also reduces the use of animal experiments in early stages of drug testing; improves drug safety; lowers the risk for patients during clinical trials; and speeds up the development of medicines for patients in urgent need of healthcare. Human computer models are now available at different scales, from single cells to whole hearts, and they can be used to explore the behaviour of the human heart in healthy or diseased conditions, and under drug action.
We incorporated the technology into software, dubbed Virtual Assay. This software offers a simple user interface in which a control population of healthy cardiac cells with specific properties, based on human data, can be built. The whole process is very quick: it takes under five minutes to test one drug in a population of 100 human cardiac cell models.
Pharmaceutical companies are using and evaluating Virtual Assay, which is available with a free academic licence and can be used by clinicians and pharmaceutical companies. With the union of academia, pharmaceutical industry and regulatory agencies we hope to accelerate the uptake of human-based in silico methodologies for the evaluation of cardiac drug safety and efficac .
While simulations of heart cells can run in a few minutes, 3D computer models of the whole heart still require a huge amount of computational power. One heartbeat, for example, can take about three hours in a supercomputer with almost 1,000 processors.
Computer simulations are a faster, cheaper and effective alternative to animal experiments – and they will soon play an important role in the early stages of drug development.
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