Of Mice (Studies) and Men

Here's an article from Science on the problems with mouse models of disease. or years, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, drug regulators, and even the general public have lamented how rarely therapies that cure animals do much of anything for humans. Much attention has focused on whether mice with different diseases accurately reflect what happens in sick people. But Dirnagl and some others suggest there's another equally acute problem. Many animal studies are poorly done, they say, and if conducted with greater rigor they'd be a much more reliable predictor of human biology. The problem is that the rigor of animal studies varies widely. There are, of course, plenty of well-thought-out, well-controlled ones. But there are also a lot of studies with sample sizes that are far too small, that are poorly randomized, unblinded, etc. As the article mentions (just to give one example), sticking your gloved hand into the cage and pulling out the first mouse you can grab is not an appropriate randomization technique. They aren't lottery balls - although some of the badly run studies might as well have used those instead. After lots of agitating and conversation within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in the summer of 2012 [Shai] Silberberg and some allies went outside it, convening a workshop in downtown Washington, D.C. Among the attendees were journal editors, whom he considers critical to raising standards of animal research. "Initially there was a lot of finger-poi...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Animal Testing Source Type: blogs