No more lab rats

Can animal testing be eliminated? Thomas Hartung examined the future of toxicity testing, including the use of big data and human in vitro models.

Thomas Hartung, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health

As part of his efforts to drive a paradigm shift in toxicity testing to improve public health, Thomas developed lab-grown “mini-brains” from human stem cells as an alternative to animal models for testing new drugs. His team also created the largest machine-readable toxicological database – allowing toxicity predictions by machine learning that outperform lab animals. Thomas is professor of Toxicology (Chair for Evidence-based Toxicology), Pharmacology, Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, and University of Konstanz, Germany. He is also director of their Centers for Alternatives to Animal Testing and heads the Human Toxome project.