Animal testing’s days are numbered thanks to award-winning organ-on-a-chip

Your heart in chip form (Design Museum)

Good design is about more than just looking nice - and nothing demonstrates that better than this year’s Design Museum Design of the Year Award winner. It might look like a pretty glowing box but this microchip actually houses living human tissue and is capable of mimicking several of your organs. Your heart, lungs, gut, bone marrow, liver and kidneys can be replicated on the tiny glowing chip which, researchers hope, could one day mean the end of animal testing.

The USB-sized chip is lined with living human cells which imitate both the micro-architecture and functions of human organs. The idea is to create 10 chips that can be lined together to ape the entire human body.

As well as saving our furry friends from further testing trials, the chips could mean big things for the medical world. Personalised medicine would be much easier to develop if scientists could put together a chip with your exact specifications to test the impact of certain drugs on your specific body. Drug discovery should also become much faster and cheaper with the need for live test subjects removed.

The win marks the first time a medical design has won the Design Museum award in the eight years it has been running. The researchers, Donald Ingber and Don Dongeun Huh from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, aren’t your average designers.

“The team of scientists that produced this remarkable object don’t come from a conventional design background. But what they have done is clearly a brilliant piece of design,” Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, said. After identifying a problem, “they solved it with elegance and economy of means, putting technology from apparently unrelated fields to work in new ways”.

It could save lives and it looks really nice. None of the other entries stood a chance.