To test a potential cure for hepatitis B, Benitec Biopharma Ltd. could have infected as many as 50 chimpanzees with the liver disease, then given them the drug and watched what happened. Instead, the Australian company turned to a U.K. startup for “livers on a chip” contaminated with the virus. CN Bio Innovations, spun out of the University of Oxford, will pump Benitec’s medicine into its LiverChip, a complex piece of engineering not much bigger than a smartphone loaded with 600,000 human cells and designed to behave like a real organ.

April 29, 2015 ・ From Bloomberg Business