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."
Please dont poke the rats, you might make them angry, and you wont like them when they are angry.
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.
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.
", 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
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.
Ghouls? Well that's funny, because naked mole rates are a prime example of a eusocial creature. Like bees. They form a society for the greater good, but they also work for the greater good at their own detriment. Only the queen is allowed to reproduce. The others CAN, but DON'T. So they're supporting the colony not for their own offspring, but for the sake of their nieces and nephews. How ghoulish.
Eusocial, it's crazy stuff.
And now I'm going to have an entirely different spin on the haunted crypt full of ghouls in the next D&D campaign.
It *can't* be worse than chemo.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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-