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Peoples' Immune Systems Can Now Be Duplicated In Mice
cylonlover writes "Because everyone's immune system is different, it's impossible to predict with absolute certainty how any given person will react to a specific medication. In the not-too-distant future, however, at-risk patients may get their own custom-altered mouse, with an immune system that's a copy of their own. Medications could be tried out on the mouse first, and if they are shown to have no adverse effects, the person could take the medication with a higher degree of confidence. If the person has an autoimmune disease, the mouse could also provide valuable insight into its treatment. A team led by Columbia University Medical Center's Dr. Megan Sykes has recently developed a method of creating just such a 'personalized immune mouse.'"
It remains to be shown how realistically close to human this mouse model can possibly be.
One remembers that a few years ago http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp068082 (New England Journal of Medicine), a candidate antibody-type medicament from TeGenero produced severe toxicity in the first (and only) volunteers who received it, though previous animal trials had seemed to give a green light to take it forward to humans. Although the initial test animals there were not altered as in the way now proposed, clearly limits exist for the degree of alteration that can be achieved.
-wb-
Embryos don't have an immune system, per se ... that comes much later in development. Plus, even children's immune systems are not as developed as adult ones.