Gaillard Maxence
Centre for Medical Ethics, Department of Health and Society, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2025 Mar 20;13:1497060. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1497060. eCollection 2025.
The development of microphysiological systems (MPS) is pushing ethical standards in biomedical research to a breaking point. This article argues that only a perspective drawing from engineering ethics will be able to address the new challenges raised by organoids and organs-on-chips. Extending progressively the scope of moral questioning, we discuss successively the following areas: i) individual consent: when cell lines are generated and human biomaterial is circulated and incorporated into biotechnologies whose life cycle will far exceed the scope envisioned by donors and manufacturers, the classic notion of informed consent becomes almost obsolete, or at least needs to be revisited. ii) Collective deliberation: MPSs raise many expectations for animal replacement and the advancement of precision and regenerative medicine. The management of these prospects by different stakeholders, and for everyone, is itself an ethical challenge at the interface of science and society. iii) Consideration of novel entities: some complex microphysiological systems may be endowed with a moral status in the near future, and this will have an impact on how researchers treat them and work with them.
微生理系统（MPS）的发展正将生物医学研究中的伦理标准推向临界点。本文认为，只有从工程伦理中汲取的观点才能应对类器官和芯片上器官带来的新挑战。我们逐步扩大道德质疑的范围，依次讨论以下几个方面：i）个人同意：当细胞系产生、人类生物材料流通并被纳入生命周期将远远超出捐赠者和制造商预想范围的生物技术时，经典的知情同意概念几乎过时，或者至少需要重新审视。ii）集体审议：MPS对动物替代以及精准医学和再生医学的进步引发了诸多期望。不同利益相关者对这些前景的管理，以及对每个人而言，这本身就是科学与社会交汇点上的一项伦理挑战。iii）对新实体的考量：一些复杂的微生理系统在不久的将来可能被赋予道德地位，这将影响研究人员对待它们以及与之合作的方式。
