When you receive the Seal you will begin to care both about your health and about the environment. A new technology promises that a lot of animal testing can be eliminated and at the same time make it much economy for new drugs to come to market.
The new technology involves biochips, the MetaChip and the DataChip. These biochips act just like the body act when it takes a drug. They will be able to show either there are any toxic side-effects of taking the drug. As high as 70 percent of new drugs being advanced have to be scrapped because they are toxic to the body. But this is not discovered until after each drug cost hundreds of millions of dollars in research money.
These biochips promise to eliminate all that wasted cost in drug development. And they promise to eliminate much of the unethical experimenting currently done on animals. The European Union has banned all such testing on animals and that is set to begin in 2009. At that time there will be quite a store opened up for the biochips.
The biochips are glass slides dotted with tiny droplets of enzymes from the human body. The MetaChip has liver enzymes. It can show either a drug is toxic to the liver. The DataChip contains enzymes from the bladder or kidney as well as the liver. Those can also be tested for toxicity. And if there is any toxicity it will be found much earlier in the drug trial process, rescue huge amounts of money.
Animal testing is not just unethical. Its accuracy is also dubious. There is all the time a question of either humans will have the same reaction animals have. It can give a normal idea, but nothing specific enough.
The biochips show how humans will react. And yet what is being advanced now is still not specific sufficient of testing. The researchers have big dreams for biochips, together with "personalized" testing. In the future, every sick person can have his or her own biochips made from enzymes from his or her body. That way drugs can be tested for their reaction with that personel person, not for all population in general.
This heralds and important improvement in medicine--the "personalization" of curative treatment. In the hereafter drugs can be chosen and even advanced for individuals or smaller, more specific groups of people. Drugs currently are advanced for every person and anyone. And that is not good. population vary widely in their genetics and predispositions to disease. Their chemical make-ups are different. So why not treat them differently, since they are different?
That is what this new technology promises, although we are not there yet. This is only the beginning. Someone else dream researchers have is the dream of together with more organs in the biochips. In the hereafter all the organs can be tested, together with the heart, the brain, and the skin. This will give a more holistic photo of the reaction of the body of a person to a particular drug.
When you are sealed you will begin to notice your health and the environment too. God will show you how to both extend your life and take care so you do not destroy the earth when you receive the Seal.
