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Nanosensors Could Help Reduce Laboratory Animal Testing
cylonlover writes "Animal testing is an area that elicits strong feelings on both sides of the argument for and against the practice. Supporters like the British Royal Society argue that virtually every medical breakthrough of the 20th century involved the use of animals in some way, while opponents say that it is not only cruel, but actually impedes medical progress by using misleading animal models. Whatever side of the argument researchers fall on, most would likely use an alternative to animal testing if it existed. And an alternative that reduces the need for animal testing is just what Fraunhofer researchers hope their new sensor nanoparticles will be."
Even if you disagree with animal rights, This would be a very cost effective way to test theories. A sensor doesn't need food, water or shelter. And if you remove those factors, development costs go down.
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Well, there goes my plan. Now I'm just a guy with a shitload of rats in his basement.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This idea is decades old -- testing substances in tissue culture. The Frauenhofer guys have come up with an interesting improvement.
It will never replace most of the animal testing.
Researchers do tissue culture testing all the time. Then after the tissue culture tests, they have to see if it still works in the rats. Lots of times it doesn't. That's especially true with cancer treatments. There are lots of pathways in real animals, and they interfere with each other, particularly liver enzymes.
We cured cancer in tissue culture many times. Then they try to repeat it in animals and it doesn't work.
And lots of animal testing has nothing to do with activating a receptor. How can you send a tissue culture through a maze?
This is especially a problem for discovering harmful effects of consumer products.
Peta Todd? She always wins in my books.
TFA says they measure the levels of ATP to see if cells are being damaged by chemicals. Its my understanding that cancer cells still do the whole ATP storage thing. Yes they can see if a certain chemical kills cells but they still need animal testing to make sure it doesn't cause cancer or interfere with any other interactions between cells or any other biological process that goes on when the cells are in an animal and not a petri dish
They just get nervous and give the wrong answers anyway.
Have gnu, will travel.
One cost of this "cheaper" system that no one has discussed yet, is it slows down research. Lets say it takes a week to do a nano sensor run, an a week to do a rodent run.
So old fashioned technique is 100 mice get 10 samples in one week for a rodent run
The new technique is 100 nanosensors get 10 samples in one week, result is 8 totally suck but 2 might either work or give mice cancer or something. Then 20 mice get 2 samples in week two, the rodent run. Now, yes, you've saved the life of 80 mice, but "one week's worth" of human victims just died, and you just paid an extra weeks pay to the chemists and docs and statisticians, an extra week of capital costs, interest payments, etc. I hope you really love mice, because each one saved might divide out to cost a dead human patient and tens of thousands of dollars and maybe a person-lifetime of human labor.
Another weird thing to think about is my wife traps and kills about a mouse per week in the summer in the garage. So a weird balance exists where if the company has more than 80 employees, then wasting a week saves the lives of 80 mice at work, while they kill more than 80 mice in their garages...sort of like the people standing in front of the KFC restaurant protesting that windmills kill birds, or serving turkey subs at the anti-bird killing windmill protest march.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Raise your hand if you read it as "Nonsense Could Help Reduce Laboratory Animal Testing" the first time.
how conscious and sentient is a rodent? probably a little conscious and not sentient at all.
no, that is only the hypothesis of animal rights activists, and also some (unscientific) lawmakers. it is an assumption without proof
Co-inclusive with the right to put whatever drugs you choose into your body, and the right to end your own life when you choose, the right to have physical relations with whatever other consenting partners you choose, etc. would be the right to participate in human experimentation if you choose. By prohibiting widespread voluntary human experimentation, governments are depriving you of the right to sell your labor on the open market in exchange for wages.
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Some products can only be tested on animals since it is intended for their use. Microsoft Windows, for example, should never be tested with a sapient creature.
Testing stuff in cell culture has been around since the beginning of the last century. Testing ATP levels as a proxy for cell viability is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It is pretty crude test too. These assays are used on a daily basis and are routinely automated to do millions of compounds per day using standard tech without any 'nano' buzzwords. Admittedly this sensor may increase the assay density so we can do even more drugs in a single run. However, it is not going to replace a single lab animal. We already test all drugs in cell culture before going into animals.
This is just an example of a membrane permeable dye for ATP detection. They are just looking at cells grown in cell culture media....
While this is cool, it is far from a replacement for animal models. For example, this would be useless to test the immune system response to a pathogen. It wouldn't let you determine how a bacterial pathogen enters its host and disseminates through the body. It wouldn't let you see what blood stream levels are produced for a given oral dose of a drug.
Animal research sucks... but so does disease. No one does animal research because they enjoy it (well, OK maybe a few crazies out there).
This article is completely misleading. What they developed is an ATP-dependent ratiometric dye. It is nice but it is not the first ratiometric dye. It is also not the first fluorescent ATP reporter. How will this stop scientists to use animals? It won't. It is just one more tool in an already vast existing array of tools to study cells using fluorescence imaging. This journalist is an idiot. Where are the cells going to come from? For most practical interesting cases, they are going to be "extracted" from animals. Also while ATP is indeed an important molecule, it is really naive to believe that monitoring ATP alone can tell you anything about the state of a cell, especially in vivo, except whether or not it has enough glucose and oxygen. If it was as simple as "expose them to the substance under investigation." to find something worthwhile, everybody would already do it using calcium reporters, NADH autofluorescence, glucose reporters or any other of the numerous similar tools already available on the market.
And the rodents do look more attractive with makeup.
So the cosmetic was an easy target for that kind of rebuttal, but it would be elementary to not automatically recognize all the things that are NOT superficial(in your opinion)where the stakes are much higher than personal appearance i.e. cancer drugs, antivirals, antibiotics, etc. Check the elevation of animals to the value of humans at the door please.
Even when they test on animals, they still have to test on humans because we react differently to chemicals than animals.
Too true. But it's a lot like what Winston Churchill said about democracy: " No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." We absolutely suck at creating model systems in which to test drugs, but we're better than we used to be :)
>that virtually every medical breakthrough of the 20th century involved the use of animals in some way,
All those test results would still have been accomplished with human test subjects instead of animal ones....
I prefer using human test subjects , as no cruelty will come to them they way it does to animals in labs,
and the testing will not be needlessly done, where as I find many of the tests on animals are done quite carelessly sometimes
as they know they can just easily get more test subjects.
The difference is when you put someone's son or daughter in there to test on,
all of a sudden you develop some interest in making sure the formulas are accurate!!!
Wonder why that is, maybe because we have so little respect for life other than human....!!!