Mice Get Human Breasts

cavehobbit writes "Nature.com reports: Lab mice have grown tissue more usually confined to a bra - lumps of human breast. The growths should help researchers work out how cancer develops. My only question is: Will Logitech or Microsoft be first to market...."

Comments

Human Body "Emulation"

[parvenu74]

An interesting concept: since mouse breast cancer is sufficiently different from human breast cancer that the efficacy of the research is limited, make the breasts on the mouse more human so that the resulting cancer is more human... Basically the mouse -- or any other lab animal for that matter -- becomes the host for a human emulation layer for studying disease.

Is it just me, or does this makes make anyone else think of the WINE project: create a more Windows-like "tissue mass" on Linux in order to grow/study the cancer on a different platform...

in other news

[Finuvir]

Slashdot has its first ever story with no moderations other than 'funny'.

Re:White Mice

[Kobal]

I know this is a joke, but it isn't that off target. The point isn't to see whether they'll develop a cancer, but how and how soon.
This mouse/human model will certainly be most helpful in studying hormone-dependent breast cancers, since in-vitro cellular assays have given wildly different results against similar substances. A partially-human-yet-ethically-useable whole body model is certainly welcome in the field.
By the way, depending on the studies and their results, this line of research may deal a vicious blow to the partisans of both the vegan diet and alternative hormone replacement treatments for menopaused women, which rely heavily on soy foods and other beans, containing large amounts of potential endocrine disruptors (estrogen agonists and antagonists mostly: coumestrol, genistein and daidzein to name a few), all potentially linked to breast cancers.
On the other hand, these phytoestrogens may really have a preventive effect as the pharmaceutical industry claims, even if research has been contradictory until now.

That's just what it is

[Spamalamadingdong]

Many of the problems with research into AIDS is that no animal reacts to the virus the same way that humans do; there are similar monkey viruses, but they do not cause the same sort (or necessarily any) disease. Ditto with Alzheimer's and a ton of other things out there.

There are already efforts to produce chimeric animals with some human genes so that they will react more like humans to drugs, diseases and even general development. There are also ethicists looking very closely at these efforts - I don't see what's unethical about making a mouse that has a breast made of human tissue, but when you start talking about making brains develop more like humans it starts getting a little iffier.