Is artificial skin the answer to animal testing?

I saw some interesting development in the creation of artificial skin. According to scientists at Ohio State University, synthetic skin is getting good enough to mimic animal skins in test labs. This means that cosmetic companies will no longer need to do animal patch testing.

Of course, the technology is still a little way from being a replacement for animal testing (or for replacing human skin for burn victims) but they are making progress.

Things like this can really have a big impact on the development of better cosmetics. One of the biggest hurdles to developing better skin cosmetic products is that you don’t have a good substrate to test new formulas on. Sure, you can use living humans but most of them don’t take to kindly to having chemicals put on them for hours days and weeks.

This could be a great invention. I can’t wait until it happens.