Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing, bonus story of the week.

Today on Forbes, how AI and mini organs could replace testing drugs on animals.

At Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, researchers have created something extraordinary,

tiny, beating lab-grown, quote, hearts.

Visible only under a microscope,

the diminutive innards are called organoids. They can be grown in a matter of days from a patient's own stem cells, and their doctors use them to screen for the best medicine for their condition,

sparing months of trial and error. They're also core to the future of drug testing, and someday, perhaps the end of the lab rat.

Animal testing has been mandated by law since 1937, when a new formulation of a common

antibiotic had a poisonous new ingredient, and killed more than 100 people.

Nearly a century later, drugs are still being

pulled from shelves because they have toxic effects, even though animal testing showed they

were safe. Now, politicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs are pushing for new, more accurate

ways to test drugs before they get to human clinical trials, potentially saving lives

and billions of dollars in the process. In 2022, a group of scientists ran an experiment with 27

known drug compounds that animal studies had shown to be safe. Some of them had turned out to have

toxic side effects and had been pulled from the market after they'd killed people.

The researchers tested the 27 compounds on a new technology called, quote, organ on a chip.

Similar to organoids, so-called organ chips have clusters of cells embedded in a diminutive

electronic device that can simulate an organ's behavior.

The researchers found that liver organs on a chip accurately predicted which compounds were dangerous,

an advancement that might someday lead to significant cost savings in the extremely expensive

drug development process. More accurate testing using organ chips could save the industry

...