Body parts in a chip

Before testing a therapy on humans usually you try it at least on rats or mice to make sure there are no adverse effects at least on the animals, then you want to see also some positive effects so you then try it on people to see if it works as it has worked on animals, you can't just try things on people even if money it's not an issue.

In case of SCI to develop a therapy just with animal studies it is very time consuming (several months for every single variable you try to isolate) and expencive. So dish models of SCI have been developped to do preliminary experiments without using animals.
Dish models are more or less like a slice of the spinal cord. That is not very realistic, but still very usefull for many studies.
More recently 3D models have been developped to try to create a more realistic model and further reduce the need of costly and time consuming animal testing.
This tecnology of body part in a chip it is a remarkable step forward and I believe it will be usefull also to study SCI.

It is convenient from all perspective to find alternatives to animal studies, so I also think that animal rights people -maybe- are actually helping research to go faster because they are pushing scienze to find alternatives to animal studies that in the end will make scienze go faster (I am not sure if many researchers would fully agree with me here )
Maybe I am being too optimistic, but I hope not

Paolo