The impacts of this device are many. First the development of these more body-like culture models will result in the reduction of the use of animals in research. This will of course spare animal lives but also likely have the possibility to provide better data, as animals not always will respond as humans. This has several implications, first drugs that would potentially have been suitable for humans are discarded during the development process as they did not have the anticipated effect in an animal model, resulting in lots of resources wasted; or harmful substances could be cleared for human use as they have falsely been deemed safe, because they were not harmful to the animal. Better culture models could thus result in better use of resources as well as more safe drugs.
This model also provides them means to study biological processes that is not currently possible in current culture models or in animal models. In this model bacterial-intestinal interactions could for example be studied. This is not currently possible under static culture conditions due to the bacteria entirely taking over and over growing the cell culture, nor in the body as it is of course not possible to see these processes when they take place inside of the body.
The developed device will thus be interesting both for other researchers and for commercial companies. By this it will have a indirect impact on the general public through advancing the research results and general knowledge and through use during development of for example more advanced and better suited drugs.
