29 minute read
Where science intersects with politics and morality
This is the only way to save our natural world
Rights of
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Matilda Brown examines how giving rights to the natural world could be our best chance at saving it from the destructive consequences of climate change and our behaviour
Imagine a world where nature itself is a political actor recognised in law. In this world, deforestation would be genocide, and the use of bee-killing pesticides a hate crime. It may seem like a radical approach to environmental law, but charging 5p for a plastic bag clearly isn’t going to stop us from hurtling towards an irreversible increase in global temperature. When you break down what it means to be human, the way in which humans exploit the natural world is truly questionable. Once it was tool use that made us unique, then crows and chimpanzees proved us wrong. Even down to the response of plants to light and gravity, another side to the previously unconscious plant kingdom has been revealed. The narcissism many humans in “the West” exhibit when putting organisms in arbitrary hierarchical boxes is fickle and used only to reassure ourselves that killing such diverse and intricate beings is justifiable. We are treating the environment as if it gives nothing in return, when in fact we are the parasites that are sucking the life out of the very thing that sustains us. Bring yourself back to the lockdown of 2020. The thing that kept many of us going were our daily walks in nature: people risked fines just to get a whiff of fresh air. Surely something that provides us with such joy and never fails to boost our mental health should be protected in law and valued as much as our therapists? I fail to believe anyone can stand in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat and still think this life-sustaining dormant volcano is any less precious than a human. It may just seem like a mass of rock but it has been on this planet 344 million years longer than humans have and watched us build a city around it. Something that special surely should have the same rights we do? The notion of such natural beauties being alive is not a new one. In some Native American religions everything from a rock to a buffalo is part of the Great Spirit, and I think many other humans need to learn from this philosophy. Breaking down the human ego is vital to save the planet, and I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate this than by putting everything and everyone on this planet as equals in the law. The practical implications of nature having the same rights as humans is questionable when not even all humans have access to their rights. However, I’d like to draw on the example of Aotearoa granting personhood to the Whanganui river in 2017, a campaign led by the indigenous Māori people to protect their environment. The river is now being protected by law against harmful fertiliser run-off and it cannot be redirected for the purpose of hydropower – essentially, the river can live. By putting nature in law, the guardians of such entities like the Whanganui river have a better chance of fighting against violations of the environment, and surely anything that gives this planet a higher chance of living is worth doing. It is notable as well that, although a victory for the safety of the future of the river, this is also a step in the fight against settler colonialism, giving the Māori people back their stolen rights.
If more countries start to treat every habitat, and all the organisms within that habitat, as equal actors to humans in law, large-scale changes to fight against climate change will have room to happen. Industrialised societies have done enough damage exploiting resources and brainwashing generations of people into thinking it is our right to do so. It’s time to change perspective and give a voice to the many indigenous people campaigning for their earth to be valued. It’s time to give a voice, and listen to nature. If everyone starts to carry this philosophy with them in everyday life, really listening to and observing nature, not only will the natural world thank us, but we might just get something out of it too.
Matilda Brown (she/her) is a first-year biology student with a love for ecology and zoology
Nature
A fundamental mind shift will be required
Alkisti Kallinikou discusses how, to protect the natural environment, we must not only give nature rights but change our way of thinking from being owners to being part of nature
More than 2,500 trees will be uprooted as construction works for new subway lines begin in Athens, Greece. This follows a devastating summer in which more than 110,000 hectares (424 square miles) of forest areas have burned, more than five times the average from 2008 to 2020. Granted, the new routes are expected to lower CO2 emissions, but environmental organisations claim the works could move forward without laying bare the already limited urban green areas. Alas, the easiest (read cheapest) solution prevailed. Would such decisions come as lightly if the rights of nature were legally recognized? Like elsewhere, Greece’s legislation promotes the human right to a healthy environment but not the rights of nature itself. As often occurs, laws in force tend to legalise harm by regulating the amount of destruction or pollution corporations and countries can get away with, rather than protecting the environment. Rights of Nature (RoN) is a theory advocating for the legal standing of ecosystems and other natural communities. RoN is grounded on the premise that these entities have inherent rights to existence, thriving, and regeneration of their life cycles, and acknowledges that nature’s wellbeing must be maintained. Furthermore, the movement authorises the ecosystem to be defended in a court of law and for people to act as its representatives. This may pose a fundamental change from traditional regulatory systems which, reflecting dominant ideologies, treat nature as property under human yoke. Naming something a possession automatically endows the owner with the authority to exploit it as they see fit – be that to look after or damage it. Such ideas stem from a broader philosophical stance of humans acquiring an illformed sense of dominance because of their “heightened” abilities. Consequently, we regard ourselves as detached, superior organisms, abusing what we supposedly own for our profit.
Meanwhile, environmental reports become increasingly bleak, desperately signalling that time for action is running out while nothing truly changes. Species extinction, climate change, deforestation, overmining, overfishing, all products of our continuous failure to grasp human hybris, have become firmly embedded in our everyday dictionaries, demonstrating the exigency for a paradigm shift in our attitudes. But can this be brought on by RoN? There are a few practical concerns to consider, especially as granting legal standing for natural communities has so far been mostly a symbolic gesture and has not materialised in momentous changes. Adopting RoN alone is not sufficient to alter the narrative; it must also be appropriately enforced and safeguarded. In 2011, the Global Alliance for Rights of Nature (GARN) filed a lawsuit against a construction company in Ecuador for polluting the Vilcabamba River with rubble. The Provincial Justice Court ruled in favour of the river, but the company never complied, and GARN purportedly did not have the means to further pursue the case. Similarly in Toledo, Ohio, although citizens voted for a Bill of Rights granting personhood to Lake Erie, the decision was deemed unconstitutional by the federal judge and overruled. Furthermore, some sceptics question whether humans are capable of understanding what is best for nature. Are we fit to represent its needs at the expense of our personal interests? Who is well-equipped to act on behalf of nature and how can that be assessed? Author and forester Aldo Leopold advised humans to start seeing nature as a community in which we belong rather than as a commodity we own. Leopold’s words resonate with the deep ecology philosophy and the concept of an ecological self. Arne Naess, who coined both terms, understood this self as one capable of identifying with other living beings, as one that sees nature and human as a unit, not a duality. While deep ecology is not itself a science, it is grounded on physics demonstrating humans are an integral part of nature, and it recognizes the value of nature in and of itself, irrespective of its utility to humans. Perhaps then, this kind of mindset is prerequisite to comprehending the need for theories like RoN. We need to urgently reconsider the dichotomy we’ve long established between nature and human and our false entitlements that come with it. Adopting RoN alone is pointless; coupled with a drastic shift in our attitudes, it might become a significant step towards a brighter future.
Alkisti Kallinikou (she/her) is a writer, researcher, and aspiring journalist, who is also interested in science communication.
Gambling a life for a life
saviour
Millie Chambers argues that having a saviour sibling is not as immoral an idea as you would first expect it to be
Films, such as My Sister's Keeper, have dramatised the use of saviour siblings, triggering an objectionable emotional response. When first exploring the subject, I was utterly against the idea of a child being used to treat a sibling. However, the reality is far less evocative and an extremely innovative way of saving otherwise helpless lives. A saviour sibling is a child conceived naturally or through IVF to treat an older sibling with a genetic disease. This involves the selection of embryos free from disease and a “perfect” donor match to the child. Half of our human leukocyte antigen (HLA) type is inherited maternally and half paternally, meaning each sibling has a 25% chance of being a match, compared to other relatives where the chances are much slimmer. Once born, saviour children offer the chance of a permanent cure for their sibling via hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplantations. HSCs are blood-forming cells found in bone marrow, peripheral blood, and umbilical cord blood. For many lethal disorders, these transplants are the only current therapeutic approach. The Nash family, whose story inspired My Sister’s Keeper, were the first to produce a saviour sibling. Their daughter, Molly, suffered from Fanconi anaemia, a life-threatening disease characterised by bone marrow deficiency and with a life expectancy of 8–9 years. Her only hope of survival was a bone marrow transplant from a perfectly matched sibling. Following umbilical cord HSC donation from her newly born brother, Adam, she had an 85–95% chance of recovery, high statistics for a child whose fate would otherwise have been death. Today Molly is alive and healthy because of Adam. The objection that saviour siblings are commodities and not valued in their own right is a difficult argument to sustain. Having a child for the purpose of treating a sibling isn’t dissimilar to more common purposes of providing an heir, “completing” a family, being a playmate for an existing child, or saving a marriage. Children are used as means in many cases, and I believe it’s untrue to claim that most children conceived for the reasons above aren’t loved or that it determines the attitudes towards them once born. It’s difficult to separate the reasons for conception being genuine desire for a child or to save an existing child; however, if parents are willing to go to extremes to save an existing child, they most likely have a lot of love and care to raise other children. The idea that manipulating embryos for saviour siblings could manifest into regular production of designer babies is a fear of the technology being overused rather than being used for good and preventing suffering. Screening out a genetic disease isn’t comparable to screening out a particular eye colour, especially in the UK where trait selection is heavily regulated. Genetic disease elimination gives a child the chance of being on a relatively even playing field when entering the world by being healthy. What parent wouldn’t want to give their child every chance of survival? Only one argument against saviour siblings holds merit: the welfare of the child. This is difficult to assess because it varies greatly depending on the individual and is lacking in research. However, if a saviour sibling wasn’t created through IVF, the alternative would not be another life in which they were conceived naturally, but nonexistence. Therefore, whilst psychological harm to the saviour sibling is unpredictable, even if some psychological harm is observed, it’s unlikely that non-existence would have been the better option. Despite this, research into the impact on the saviour siblings' welfare is required to make a fair assessment. There should also be welfare checks and better legal protection as they age and gain more autonomy. Nevertheless, the UK’s monitoring of saviour sibling creation is one of the most regulated in the world and is imperative in preventing the misuse of this technology. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority demands that each clinic apply for a licence for every new disease they want an embryo tested for. Furthermore, tissue typing cannot be done for the purpose of harvesting organs, and a “best interests” test is conducted to evaluate the pros and cons of each case. Utilising this procedure can save, as well as create, lives. All I see is a net gain.
Millie Chambers (she/her) is a thirdyear Neuroscience undergraduate student. Twitter: @MillieChambers_
sib lings Draw the line at organs
Clodegh Aherne asks us to consider the psychological as well as the physical impacts on donor-children - is it really worth it?
A Time magazine article from 1991 captures the fraught nature of the debate surrounding saviour siblings, dubbing the practice as “on the side of the angels” while the “devilish ghost of Dr Mengele” hovers in the wings. Saviour siblings are children who are able to provide stem cells, blood, bone marrow, or organs for their seriously ill siblings. The ethics of this practice are murky, with varying degrees of ethical acceptability depending on the demands made of the donor child. It is my position that whole organ donation, such as of kidneys, lungs, or liver by saviour siblings is not ethically defensible, but that tissue donations, such as blood or bone marrow, which involve lower risk and lower levels of harm to the donor child, can be justified. This phenomenon has caught the cultural and public imagination for the past three decades in the media, most notably in Jodi Picoult’s novel and the 2009 film, My Sister’s Keeper. In Picoult’s story, as in the most highprofile cases, a child is conceived specifically for this purpose, to act as a therapeutic tool for their older sibling through preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and in vitro fertilisation (IVF). The practice of repeated donations of organs, blood, bone marrow, and tissue throughout the child’s life, as depicted in Picoult’s film, induces a visceral reaction among the public and gives rise to an “ick factor”, calling up images of baby farming and organ harvesting. In reality, saviour siblings usually make relatively harmless tissue donations of blood or bone marrow. There may even only be a need to harvest stem cells from their umbilical cord, which poses no risk to the donor sibling. Harvesting bone marrow, though subject to common surgical risks associated with general anesthesia and infection, is generally considered a low-risk procedure However, solid organ donation is a far more extreme procedure. A live liver transplant, for example, which may be necessary to treat children. with metabolic diseases such as Tay- Sachs or Gaucher disease, involves part of the liver, either the right or left lobe, being removed from the donor for transplantation. The risks of such a procedure for the donor include infection, bleeding, bile leaks, and blood clots, with the risk of the donor developing liver failure increasing with donation of a larger volume of liver, such as the right liver lobe. To impose these risks upon a child incapable of providing informed consent cannot be ethically justified in the way that blood or bone marrow donation can be. For lower-risk procedures involving a minor infringement of bodily autonomy, it is justifiable that proxy consent from the parents is sufficient. In the case of living liver donations in Scotland, the donor must be aged over 16 years, reflecting the impermissibility of such a donation applying to saviour siblings. Another significant ethical concern is the potential negative psychological effects on the donor child. They may suffer a lack of selfconfidence as they begin to understand that they were created to provide treatment for their older sibling and may bear significant burdens if the treatment using their biological material fails. Imposing these potentially harmful psychological impacts, alongside harmful physical effects, on a child is oppressive and cannot be outweighed by the parents’ interests in treating the recipient sibling. The precarious balance between the need to procure treatment for a sick child and the welfare of a potential donor must be bracketed by comprehensive regulation in order to ensure that the best interests of both children are met. On this basis, I propose greater public debate, precipitating a formal regulatory framework in the UK, and a dedicated authority, parallel to the HFEA, to oversee regulation and to put safeguards in place to protect the donor children. In particular, focused consideration needs to be given to the potential psychological impacts on the donor child, and the enduring emotional and physical consequences of both donation and transplantation must be borne in mind. In any event, this is an area which demands statutory consideration, as medical sciences develop, and we try to navigate a world where we have the opportunity, but also the potential obligation, to act as a saviour to another.
Clodagh Aherne (she/her) is a 23-yearold Irish student, currently studying a Masters in Medical Law and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh
Whole-exome screening: a powerful tool for neonatal and lifelong health?
Rachel Westphal asks if genetic tests should be routine for newborn babies
If you could know, from the day you were born, your risk of developing certain diseases, would you want to? With the increasing affordability of genetic screening options, these tests have the potential to become powerful tools, empowering people towards lifelong health. In particular, whole-exome screening, which focuses on parts of the genome that can give more indication of disease risk, should become a part of routine neonatal healthcare. Some genetic tests look at all the genetic information in an organism, but whole-exome screening focuses on an important subset of the DNA. The exome is like the building instructions for putting amino acids together into a protein. If the instructions are wrong, the amino acid sequence can change and result in an abnormally-shaped protein, often causing health problems or diseases. Whole-exome screening provides people with the power to understand their health like never before. It provides more data more quickly than other types of genetic testing, such as the multi-step process of testing for one potential genetic disease at a time. A trial screening reported on over 1,000 genetic conditions, a number that will only increase as genetic data is illuminated by new knowledge. Neonatal whole-exome screening would also be straightforward to implement. In one trial, neonates under 42 days of age were successfully tested with whole-exome screening. The trial demonstrated it could be done routinely alongside the heel prick test, only a blood or saliva sample is needed, and results take just a few weeks.
Furthermore, the cost of whole-exome screening starts at £300, less than a third of the price of sequencing the entire genome. Although whole-genome sequencing is more powerful and may someday even be cheaper, for now whole-exome sequencing is more efficient as the exome is home to about 85% of genetic variations that cause disease. Take the case of Turner syndrome. This genetic disorder in females can lead to infertility and a shortening of life expectancy by more than 10 years, particularly because 22% of patients are diagnosed only after age 12. With earlier detection, interventions such as surgery, hormone treatment, and hearing aids can be implemented in a timely manner. If neonatal wholeexome screening were widely implemented, there would be similar benefits for many other diseases. Some people would prefer not to know their odds of getting a host of potentially deadly diseases and might resent the fact they had no say in the matter as a baby. However, some patients who underwent exome screening as adults thought it was a positive experience. Michelle Ewy participated in a Mayo Clinic exome study and discovered she carried the BRCA2 mutation, significantly increasing her risks of breast and ovarian cancers. Since she did not know of a family history of these cancers, she was not previously aware of her risk. After genetic counselling, she decided to opt for surgery to remove her breasts and ovaries to limit her risk of disease. Another participant in the study, Damask Grinnell, also discovered a risk of breast cancer. She said, “I think it’s better to know now and to be able to do all these preventative things.” Personally, if I could know my risk for a disease and be able to detect and intervene early, I would prefer taking that risk to not knowing at all. The law will need to protect genetic information, to ensure data is stored safely and protected from breaches and is not misused by commercial interests. Unfortunately, genetic data used in the wrong way could lead to discrimination. For example, life insurance policies above £500,000 can discriminate based on a genetic testing result. Finally, counselling should become a mandatory accompaniment to genetic testing to ensure the results are properly understood. Genetic testing is not determinative: environmental factors and diet also influence risk of disease. As such, wholeexome screening provides a limited but useful assessment of risk. Parents (and later the child) must be wellinformed about these nuances. In summary, wholeexome screening will empower families and clinicians to anticipate risk of disease to detect and intervene early. This screening method is efficient, cost-effective, and powerful. When adopted with proper counselling and protection of genetic data, it can be a successful testing programme.
Rachel Westphal (she/her) is a Medical Law and Ethics LLM student. (Twitter: @ichbinrachelw)
Do no harm – but a white lie couldn’t hurt… could it?
Placebos have been a well-known and effective tool for medical trials and professionals, but how ethical is it for doctors to use them on patients? Nathan Rockley argues they could be a slippery slope that is best left untouched
Ask yourself a question: should doctors be allowed to lie to elicit the placebo effect? Some of them do. A 2013 paper found that 12% of GPs had prescribed a “pure” placebo (eg. a sugar pill or saline solution) at least once in their career, and 97% admitted to prescribing an “impure” placebo (real treatments but effective for other conditions, eg. antibiotics for a viral infection) at least once. While beginning to write this article, I posed the question to some friends, and their responses included “no, it’s crossing a line,” and “nah, it just feels wrong.” Spoiler alert: I agree. But it was tricky to pin down why. After some thinking, it came down to three issues: it robs patients of agency, erodes trust, and could lead to more mistakes. While placebo treatment is effective in treating conditions such as depression, chronic pain, and even Parkinson’s, it is a textbook example of a paternalistic approach to doctorpatient interactions. By allowing doctors to lie, even for the sole benefit of the patient, we remove the patient from the centre of their care. You force the patient to give up their position of expertise in the interaction. For example, if I have a psychosomatic condition (one which is caused or aggravated by a mental factor such as stress), the only way treatment will work is if I don’t know it is a placebo and therefore don’t know what the root of my condition is. Furthermore, if we weaken our stance from “doctors should never lie” to “doctors shouldn’t lie to patients except when they think it is in their best interest”, what is to stop this from slipping down the slope to “doctors decide what to do and aren’t accountable to patients”? As a patient, my ability to choose what happens to my body goes from complete control to blind trust. As an aspiring doctor, the possibility that I could lie to a patient terrifies me. It seems that we are all for safeguarding the patient from others but forget that, to a degree, we must also protect the patient from ourselves. Take the case of wrong-site surgeries: one in five hand surgeons has operated on the wrong hand at some point in their career. To prevent this kind of thing, every surgical team in the UK goes through a pre-surgery checklist together which includes checking the right patient is in surgery, and that the right area of the body is labelled. Why? Because humans are flawed. Increasing the number of situations that a doctor makes decisions alone (by allowing them to lie to elicit the placebo effect) will surely increase the number of mistakes. This is not to say that we shouldn’t trust doctors. The patient-doctor trust relationship is a crucial part of a positive and healing medical experience. The issue is that if both parties aren’t open and equal in the interaction, the ability to establish trust is weakened. The effectiveness of a placebo lies in the power of psychology, and the same effect could be accessed by referral to counselling or therapy alongside treatment. This is an upgrade on a placebo, as not only are the same beneficial effects achieved, but the patient also remains at the centre of their care. Furthermore, they are empowered by the therapist to work through it themselves. Another option is meta-placebo treatment, in which the patient is informed that they are receiving a placebo and thus the ethical dilemma is somewhat avoided. Research is needed to assess the effectiveness and practicalities of meta-placebo treatment. In the meantime, white lies should stay within the realm of phrases like “I’ll be there in 5 minutes” and be kept far away from medicine.
Nathan Rockley (he/him) is a third-year medical sciences student. (Instagram: @nathanrockley)
Artificial general intelligence presents an existential threat
You’ve heard of AI, but artificial general intelligence poses another danger, as Jason Segall explores in this article, suggesting what could be done to mitigate the potential disasters the technology could bring about
As the power of computers has increased over the decades, artificial intelligence (AI) has become an invogue technology. From Siri to Alexa to the YouTube algorithm, “intelligent” computers have started to appear in almost every aspect of life. To date, however, nobody has developed a so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI). This is the kind of intelligence you and I have: our brains are capable of learning and performing just about any task out there. “What a shame!”, you might be thinking, “I’d love a robot butler to help around the house”. I too would have once agreed: who wouldn’t want a C-3PO or a Marvin the hopefullynot-so-paranoid android? Everyone, it turns out. Here’s why. Imagine a tech billionaire called Euron Tusk decided to run for president of the United States. To aid his campaign, he uses some of his near-infinite fortune to develop a technological marvel: ETAI, the first working AGI. His science team assure him that it’s about as intelligent as him. Indeed, ETAI’s inner workings are based on Tusk’s own brain. What better way to stroke the boss’ ego? As a test, Tusk decides to use the new intelligence to print flyers for his campaign. Simple enough, so his team programmes ETAI, plugs it into the internet, and heads off for a celebratory drink. What happens next? Think: if morals weren’t in question, how would you print as many flyers as you could, as fast as you could? The first sign of danger comes when Tusk’s card gets declined at the bar. Strange, but nothing serious. What he doesn’t realise is that all his vast fortune has just been spent on printing supplies by ETAI which was, of course, given access to the bank details. Damn. Naturally, the immediate response would be to try to switch ETAI off. Weirdly, though, no one sent to do the deed succeeds. If ETAI was switched off, it wouldn’t be able to complete its task, so it uses every form of manipulation Tusk used to gain his fortune – flattery, bribes, threats, the works – to keep itself online. Before long, ETAI secures its own, independent power supply, preventing anyone from pulling the plug. The manipulation doesn’t stop there. ETAI uses the social internet to convince vast swathes of the global population that paper production is beyond vital. Forests around the world begin to dwindle, then disappear, as wood pulp takes precedence over oxygen for the growing hive mind. It doesn’t take ETAI long to notice that paper, on the atomic level, is made of the same stuff as people. We are, at the end of the day, mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. And, unlike a human leader, ETAI has no care for its followers. It has no qualms about replacing wood pulp with people pulp in its flyer factories. Eventually, in its unending quest to fulfil the task it was initially set, ETAI snuffs out humanity. All for the sake of some flyers. ETAI is, of course, a simplistic example. A real AGI, if one was even possible, would likely have some form of morals programmed in, which could start to prevent some more destructive tendencies. But, any Asimov reader will recognise the perils of trying to apply morals, such as his Three Laws of Robotics, to AI. Any attempt to control an AI’s morals would, inevitably, introduce loopholes, bugs, and edge cases, any of which could lead to a runaway AI. Telling ETAI to limit deforestation would do nothing to stop it from turning people into paper, after all. Most importantly, this is not a problem we can afford to stumble into. There would be no John Conner to save us from this Terminator: once the robots take over, there would be very little chance of regaining control. It is vital that governments force as much transparency as possible on AI research. The more times a set of qualified eyeballs views a new AI before its use, the more likely it is that any bugs or logical loopholes will be caught before they can wreak destruction upon humanity. Mandating that AI research is freely, but securely, available to be examined would surely go some way to mitigate the catastrophic threat of artificial general intelligence.
Jason Segall (he/him) is a Science Communication student. (Instagram: jason.segall.7)
From Scientist to CEO
Ishani Malhotra reveals the secrets behind setting up her own company, Carcinotech, while also completing her Masters research in Regenerative Medicine.
Designing new cancer drugs requires accurate ways to test them. Tumours can be unique to each individual patient and are made up of lots of different cell types beyond the cancer cells themselves. If the entire tumour isn’t killed by drug treatment, often the cancer can come back, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that drug screening requires platforms that better represent the whole tumour environment, rather than the uniform dishes of lab-grown cancer cells traditionally used to develop therapeutics.
Having worked in cancer diagnostics, Ishani Malhotra was well aware of this problem. While studying in Edinburgh for her Masters in Regenerative Medicine, she decided to combine this knowledge with her skills in tissue engineering to set up her own company, Carcinotech.
“I started the company about 4 years ago now, and we are 3D printing tumours using patient biopsies, immune cells and cancer stem cells to provide a platform for rapid, ethical and accurate drug testing. We get biopsy samples from patients, we look at the general layout of the tumour, we look at the number of cell types involved and we try and replicate that using 3D printing with cells from the patients.”
“We make sure that all the cell types from the patient are represented because we believe -from research -that you need the 3D structure, you need all the cell types in the microenvironment of the tumour to be able to have a more accurate system to test drugs.”
Another key benefit of Carcinotech’s system is its speed. Ishani explains, “if you do drug screens you’ve got 50,000 -100,000 compounds being tested at one time… you need high-throughput”. The lab is almost completely automated with machines like the bioprinter itself, as well as robots that “feed” the printed tumours with the nutrients they need to grow. They can print these tumours into a 96 or 384 well plate in as little as 10 minutes, and drugs can then be tested on them within seven days.
Ishani had the idea while working in a hospital in cancer diagnostics. The idea evolved during her Masters, where she was working on a project similar to what Carcinotech is now doing. She remembers thinking, “I could have just taken this on as a PhD, or I could take this forward as a business”. Through speaking to academics and pitching the idea to surgeons and oncologists, she developed her understanding of the clinical need and built the idea further. With guidance from Edinburgh Innovations, she started to enter business competitions and accelerators, gaining access to training, networking and mentorship as well as exposure to funding schemes and potential investors. Since then she has grown the company, and in April this year Carcinotech closed their investment round with an impressive £1.6 million.
As well as allowing her to see the direct impact of her science, the experience has helped Ishani develop new skills. “Being CEO and running the company has been fantastic for me because I have loads of strategic ideas of how to take things forward and that has been a really fun part of trying to sell the technology to commercial pharma companies.”
High-throughput, accurate drug screening platforms like this could revolutionise future cancer drug development and Carcinotech seems well on the way to helping achieve this.
Edinburgh Innovations are here to support students and recent graduates who want to build their entrepreneurial skills and ideas. They offer support and advice to students like Ishani wanting to develop a business idea. Find out more at www.ed.ac.uk/edinburgh-innovations/for-students or @EIStudents on Twitter.
ANIMAL FARM
Could genetically modified animal organs solve the human transplant crisis?
Are animal transplants the solution to the organ transplant crisis? Emma Nance examines the ethical and moral concerns of animal transplants as well as the benefits and scientific considerations of such procedures.
Illustration by Yen Peng (Apple) Chew
