PETA can rejoice as we see the potential end of animal testing, just don’t pay attention to the horrifying lab-grown replacement

Researchers at R3 Bio are working to speed up the transition away from animal testing in laboratories, thanks to their innovative “organ sacks.” This biotech firm, backed by some serious billionaire funding, is in the process of creating complete animal organ systems. They’ve already seen success with “headless” mouse technology, and primates are next on their list.

Per UNILAD, these “organ sacks,” which the R3 team actually prefers to call “bodyoids,” are designed without a brain. This means they lack consciousness and the ability to process pain, which are the very things that make animal testing and organ harvesting ethically problematic in the first place. 

Alice Gilman, R3’s CEO and co-founder, has publicly stated she isn’t a fan of the “organ sacks” label. “It’s not missing anything, because we design it to only have the things we want,” she said, even though her lab is developing the systems for what are essentially headless mice. They’re still in the development phase for implementation, but the technology is there.

It’s a cool project, but also weirdly gross

This whole concept might seem like something straight out of science fiction, especially with the team referring to these lab-made living creatures as “bodyoids.” However, the success of their early trials with mouse-oids has already secured them major outside investment. 

One of R3’s biggest backers is particularly enthusiastic, since they believe that “replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body.” Thus, a non-sentient, headless human bodyoid, it would be a “great source of organs.”

R3’s immediate goal, once they implement the headless mouse technology, is to move on to primates. They aim to remove around 60,000 of our close relatives from the labs and cages of scientific research firms around the world. Gilman pointed out that “the benefit of using models that are more ethical and are exclusively organ systems would be that testing can be meaningfully more scalable.” 

Not only do these scientists hope that these lab-grown headless humans would solve the growing need for organs, but they also believe their innovation would make testing much more accurate. Imagine being able to skip the animal-based study stage entirely and go straight to injecting human organ sacks with experimental drugs. 

Gilman emphasized this point in a blog about the new technology, writing, “The human body is not a collection of parts; it’s a system. We can’t keep studying diseases in pieces and hoping the results will scale.” 

A bodyoid, however, allows for these systems and reflects the biology we actually live with. Thus, Gilman argues that the technology her company is developing needs to be scaled up to become a new nationwide model for testing.

Interestingly, this isn’t the only weird study I have come across recently, because researchers in Australia just learned that sperm gets lost in space. Then last year, we learned of a scientist who tragically died after potentially creating an anti-gravity device.