Slashdot Mirror
Of Mice and Cancer
Maximum Prophet points out a series of articles in Slate about the role of mice and rats in the fight against cancer. The first article discusses the problem of using the same type of animal for many tests; the reactions may be consistent, but they can also be different from the reactions a human has to the same treatment. "The inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today—raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics—may be placing unseen constraints on what we know and learn." The second article focuses on one particular type of mouse, bred specifically for consistency and for its suitability to labwork, which has come to dominate biological testing. The final piece examines what researchers are trying to learn from the naked mole rat, a species that doesn't seem to get cancer on its own, and is resistant to attempts to induce cancer. "Buffenstein and her students tried one of these shortcuts. They placed some mole rats in a gamma chamber and blasted their pale, pink bodies with ionizing rays. The animals were unimpressed."
the mole rats evolved.
They're constraining what we learn to how the fuck are they immune to cancer!
Find out, then tell my doctor, and get me some of that.
Please dont poke the rats, you might make them angry, and you wont like them when they are angry.
Scientists learn mice are different from humans. News at 11.
OK fine. Side effects: You will lose all your hair and become pink and wrinkly. May induce urge to burrow and forrage.
Last time I checked, most people don't want to be lab subjects even when there's not a whole lot of risk, and a lot of modern research means the destruction of the lifeform being tested upon, either by the disease process or by the technicians and scientists studying the progression of the disease or the treatments.
We don't allow for experimentation on prisoners generally, regardless of the possibility of consent, and that really only leaves us with the down-and-out or the insane, and even with the latter, we don't generally allow it if they're diagnosed insane as they no longer can consent either.
Most higher order or larger animals that might make better analogs to humans have gestation periods that are too long, or they're endangered or threatened, or they're more difficult to work with.
I don't see a better solution, though if one is brought to our attention I certainly won't blanket-disapprove without giving it consideration...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Keep going. Try your hardest to induce cancer in something that is resistant to it. And good luck to you when you finally do, cause then you've created the worlds first "super cancer", which will probably be contagious, cross mutate to humans, and wipe everyone out except Lance Armstrong.
Thanks a lot,
Pale Pink Mouse.
I worked with mice and rats in oncology research. That this stuff isn't directly translatable to humans is something everyone knows. For someone to comment on that would be like someone saying "Whoa! This room is just FULL of air!" Uh, yeah. And?
They use mice and rats because testing things on people is unethical and testing things on animals a lot more like us (primates, pigs, etc) is either unethical or expensive.
In my experience it wasn't the case that the biological effects were wildly different. A substance that produced a particular effect in rats often would in humans (or other animals) too, but often at a different dose. The problem with mice/rats was their tolerance. You might find a drug that was effective in rats, but its toxic dose in humans is less than or too close to its therapeutic dose.
Nope. We are clearly trying to learn how to cure simulated cancer in mice. You see, it isn't even natural cancer they are curing in the mice. They usually create an artificial cancer by genetically engineering it into the mice, then try to cure that.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
They're saying they're being constrained by only looking at the certain popular species of rodent to induce cancers and see how well a given drug then works at beating - that won't be reliable because the mice might react to a drug in a completely different way to a human. So a drug that works for mice might not in humans or perhaps even make it worse, while the wonder-drug that cures all human cancers might be missed completely because it had no effect when they tried it on mice.
The naked mole rat isn't the type of rodent they use for most of their tests though. In fact it would actually probably be a type avoided - if it's resistant to attempts to induce cancer then you can't create easily a cancer in it that you can test your new drug on, far easier to use one of the other mice. It's an example of a different type of research where they're approaching it from a different angle that might be much more productive.
OK, preferable to slow and painful death by cancer.
", but they can also be different from the reactions a human has"
yeah, no shit. everyone knows that. Mice is just a testing step. It a great way to look at cell interactions, and responce.
"may be placing unseen constraints on what we know and learn."
no, they aren't. We know the constraints. If you find a way to test without those constraints, by all means let researchers know.
" a species that doesn't seem to get cancer on its own, "
can't wait to learn why, might help us all.
Look, having a mouse that gets a specific type of cancer at 3 months, 99.999% of the time(it's actually higher) is very valuable for research.
TO sume up,
Using mice isn't absolutely perfect for all case, and some species have interesting properties we can learn from.
""The inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today—raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics—"
What a bunch of alarmist propaganda. I mean, if you don't have facts or knowledge on your side,. use alarmists word and FUD.
oh and this bit of crap:
""This is important for scientists," says Mattson, "but they don't think about it at all.""
What? every scientist I have ever talked to that does lab work is aware of this. Is this Matterson guy selling something? Clearly he is qualified, but every time I here a scientist talk about lab work with mice, this very subject comes up, and they always point out that just because it happens in mice doesn't mean we will see any affect on people.
And the graph. OMG look at how much more study on rats there is! ahhh!!
well, they are cheaper AND are a first step. So of course they are used. When there is no effect, no other animal is tests so of course it will show fewer of other type of animal is used later in the process.
OTOH, maybe only the scientist I listen to and talk to mention this, and none other do.
The man has the cred:
http://www.grc.nia.nih.gov/branches/irp/mmattson.htm
But I am confused on his statements on mice as if no one knows about those issues.
I wonder how much the reported misrepresented what he said?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You have no intellectual property. You just post the same drizzly cut and paste crap into every thread.
And eat your own shit. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v478/n7368/full/478156a.html
...our post-nuclear mole rat overlords!
OR: All I ever needed to know about high-radiation biology, I learned from Fallout 3.
"Mole rats"? More like ghoul rats!
It all fits... Mole rat hills are clearly catacombs, radioactive ruins of the rodent nuclear war.
. So a drug that works for mice might not in humans or perhaps even make it worse, while the wonder-drug that cures all human cancers might be missed completely because it had no effect when they tried it on mice.
I think that's true because they're mice. No need to invoke "inbreeding" as well.
The good news is that we now know how to cure any form of cancer in mice.
At least I have chicken.
"The inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today—raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics—may be placing unseen constraints on what we know and learn."
Have these people even *seen* humans in a cubicle farm in a large office tower?
...Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
If you judge by the article she's bucking the system by looking at naked mole rats for an explanation for why they don't get cancer. The irony is that if she succeeds in finding the explanation and isolating it out to a treatment protocol the first thing she'll do is give some mice cancer and see if the treatment works on them (ok, maybe the second if the mechanism can be disabled in the naked mole rat somehow). That isn't bucking the system, it's being at a different stage in your research; she's still forming a hypothesis as to what an effective treatment could be. Once she has that she'll move right over to the sterile, genetically identical, and above all biologically consistent lab mice and rats. Why? Because that is how you perform replicatable animal trials. If someone halfway around the world can't replicate your results your experiment isn't worth much, that's why we have millions of essentially cloned lab mice in the first place.
Research causes cancer in mice.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Biologists don't have a clue what is happening so they randomly torture animals to death hoping for results.
That is not science, it is disgusting and inhumane.
I don't know how they can live with themselves.
I will remain unchanged.
GIEF. MEH.
It *can't* be worse than chemo.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Can't be worse than chemo.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
So it's not just cockroaches that will survive a nuclear war or ecological disaster.
"Buffenstein and her students tried one of these shortcuts. They placed some mole rats in a gamma chamber and blasted their pale, pink bodies with ionizing rays. The animals were unimpressed."
Under the just throw it against the wall and see what sticks school of science.
Seems rather crude, unsophisticated, and probably rather pointless if nothing else.
The article made good points: the issues are even wider. There is much more besides the type of test-animal strain that can make for problems in effective testing.
Nowadays some new pharmaceutical product-candidates are designed and intended to work by specifically interacting with some very human-specific features of materials present in the eventual treated patients. Sometimes product-candidates of this kind are not expected to interact with non-human animal substances in a corresponding way at all.
An example lies in the specificity of human-antibody-related products (some of them intended for use against types of cancer). Their effects may be hard to mimic and test in any non-human animal subject whatever.
This makes for much harder problems in test design than in the more straightforward old days of (for example) testing candidate antibiotics. That involves checking that the material does kill the target bug and does not damage the treated animal or human subject, and in the past, observations of tested animals often gave very good indications of what would happen next when the substance was given to humans. (Caution is still needed, and clinical trial regimens accordingly have to include careful human safety testing as a follow-up to successful and careful animal safety testing.)
But when the product candidate is supposed only to interact in a special way with very human-specific substances, somehow its safety and efficacy has to be effectively tested before it gets to humans -- but how? -- when no non-human animal can be expected to show the same type of effects whether wanted or unwanted.
This new twist to the problem of test design has not always been addressed successfully. A tragic example occurred a few years ago, when a modified antibody with a design incorporating very unusual and specifically human-human interactions passed the animal safety testing that was decided on, but then went on to injure severely the first few human test volunteers by causing major acute iflammatory effects not seen in the animal tests.
The issues go well beyond selection of strains of test animals and sometimes the solutions may have to be developed on a case-by-case basis..
-wb-
Yep. You win.
It's all part of the mice's master plan to question the answer 42...
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
If you judge by the article she's bucking the system by looking at naked mole rats for an explanation for why they don't get cancer. The irony is that if she succeeds in finding the explanation and isolating it out to a treatment protocol the first thing she'll do is give some mice cancer and see if the treatment works on them (ok, maybe the second if the mechanism can be disabled in the naked mole rat somehow). That isn't bucking the system, it's being at a different stage in your research; she's still forming a hypothesis as to what an effective treatment could be. Once she has that she'll move right over to the sterile, genetically identical, and above all biologically consistent lab mice and rats. Why? Because that is how you perform replicatable animal trials. If someone halfway around the world can't replicate your results your experiment isn't worth much, that's why we have millions of essentially cloned lab mice in the first place.
Clear thinking, mod up please.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Hmm...
So.. no real difference for many of us....
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Seriously... Cancer is big, big business. I expect it will never be cured as long as this kind of money is being rolled around. I think I flipped from disturbed to disgusted by this when lots of billboard advertisements started appearing for cancer treatment facilities.
At this point, I may be happier calling this life good and heading out than feeding their damn money machine.
They would start building a Ascension Engine. ;)
Hear hear isn't that the truth!
Dr Burzynski
www.BurzynskiMovie.com
Some time when you want to watch a movie try this documentary.
This documentary tells the astonishing story of the cure for cancer
that was censored, attacked and nearly destroyed by the medical
establishment (which actually does not want a cure for cancer!). This
is a must-see documentary for everyone to see.
People laugh at those who question things as "conspiracy theorists"
and make fun of them. Funny how the evidence in this case is
irrefutable and yes it was a conspiracy and it is still going on.
Unfortunately, she's caught a terrible disease from the mole rats: she looks like one.
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The inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today—raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics....
How does that differ from humans? At least, the American variety, towards which I assume this article is biased?