'Highly realistic' fake organs offer cheaper, ethical route for trainee surgeons

Record ID: 2273043

  • Title: 'Highly realistic' fake organs offer cheaper, ethical route for trainee surgeons
  • Date: 13th November 2025
  • Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (NOVEMBER, 11, 2025) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING STUDENT AND PEACH SIMULATORS TEAM MEMBER, ZIXI WANG, GIVING DEMONSTRATION OF SURGICAL PROCEDURE ON ARTIFICIAL LUNG (SOUNDBITE) (English) LECTURER IN BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING AT KING'S COLLEGE LONDON AND PEACH SIMULATORS TEAM MEMBER, DR. ANTONIA PONTIKI, SAYING: "Peach Simulators
  • Embargoed:
  • Keywords: AI ARTIFICIAL ORGANS KING'S COLLEGE LONDON MEDICAL MEDICAL TRAINING TECH
  • Location: VARIOUS
  • City: VARIOUS
  • Country: UK
  • Topics: Europe,Science
  • Reuters ID: LVA001121311112025RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: A group of biomedical engineering students from King's College London have created "anthropomorphic phantoms" - highly realistic artificial organs - to reduce reliance on cadavers and animals in medical training and testing. 
        The team, who call themselves Peach Simulators, studied patient scans and identified engineering materials with similar properties to human tissue to develop 3D models akin to real human organs.
        "We are developing our own materials and they replicate the properties of the body really, really well without the need of any tissue," said PhD student and Peach Simulators team member, Carlo Saija. "We come up with polymers, plastics, rubbers, hydrogels, all sorts of things."
        The models enable trainee doctors and surgeons to safely practice on replicas of the human anatomy, without risk to patients, at a cheaper cost while also addressing ethical hurdles. 
        "At the moment...the standard surgical training method is using the 'see one, do one, teach one' method where trainees usually start operating directly on patients, just under the supervision of someone senior, or using animals or cadavers," said Biomedical Engineering Lecturer at King's College London and Peach Simulators collaborator, Antonia Pontiki. 
        "By providing these models that are very close to the human body, we can actually reduce the need for those unethical but also highly challenging alternatives."
        For their designs, Peach Simulators – led by Steven Morris, Zixi Wang, and Carlo Saija, alongside their cofounders Dr. Pontiki and Professor Kawal Rhode – won the Enterprise Award for Commercial Potential, as well as the Startup Winner prize, at the Engineers and Scientists in Business Fellowship (ESBF) 'Champion of Champions' competition on Friday (November 7). 
        Currently the team has developed models and simulations in medical fields including cardiology, ear, throat and nose surgery (ENT), and urology but have ambitions to expand further and fill gaps in the markets of testing and training. 
        Their designs are also being used to test new medical technologies, including AI (artificial intelligence) tools. Saija explained that using animals to test AI driven tools in medicine can have complications, as animals' bodies operate too differently to those of humans. 
        "The only way to do this without human testing is really to make something fake that looks just like the real deal," he told Reuters. 
    (Production: Hannah Ellison)
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