NYU Tandon grad student honored for research that will help eliminate animal testing in the medical sector

The International Foundation for Ethical Research (IFER) is a nonprofit dedicated to finding ways to replace and reduce the use of animals in research and testing. Each year, they award funding to a highly select group of early-career scientists who are developing or using alternatives to animal models and testing protocols.

This year, Ph.D. candidate Lunan Liu garnered an award for his Organoids-on-a-Chip Model project, which seeks to build a device that will allow for more effective and humane testing of new immunotherapies. 

Liu, a member of Professor Weiqiang Chen’s  Applied Micro-Bioengineering Lab, is working with clinicians from NYU Langone on tissue samples taken during the course of biopsies — a collaboration that could lead to more individualized, patient-specific cancer treatments. “We are, in effect, building a human avatar,” he explains. “You can see why it’s much more dynamic and effective than using mice and monkeys, which is a standard practice that does not always yield the most accurate results.” 

In general, modeling the human immune environment in current animal-based cancer models is challenging, and it’s admittedly difficult to pre-clinically validate and study novel immunotherapies. Liu’s project — the kind of interdisciplinary research that drew him to NYU Tandon’s Department of Mechanical Engineering initially — poses a possible solution to that problem.

The work is particularly timely: on December 29, 2022, President Joseph Biden signed the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 into law. Before that, the Food and Drug Administration mandated animal testing for every new drug development protocol. That mandate (outlined in the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938 and in place since then) was intended to impose strict quality and safety standards for drugs and medical devices but was seen in recent years as woefully outdated. The new act authorizes using certain alternatives to animal testing, including computer models and methods like those being developed by Liu.

“It is enormously gratifying that an esteemed organization like IFER has recognized the high caliber and social benefit of Lunan's research,” Chen says. “He is a credit to my lab, and I'm excited about all that he is sure to achieve in the future."