They’re cooking up human organoids just for that.
I mean, there are like dozens of different types of cancers, so we probably have missed some of them.
imo, there’s no single “cure” for cancer, because it’s not a single disease
Not sure why you’ve replied it to my comment which already states there are dozens of cancers and therefore dozens of cures for the dozens of cancers
Just like with antibiotics. When Penicilin was originally tested, they happened to test it on just the right animals. One kind of standard lab animals would have just died from that stuff.
In the long run, using mice to test human medicines will result in selection pressure for humans whose physiology more and more closely resembles mice.
That’s not how evolution works though
Assuming that
-
human phenotypic traits that correlate more closely with mouse traits have more-predictable outcomes with mouse-tested medicine, and
-
more-predictable medical outcomes correlate with higher survival and reproductive rates,
can’t you plug that straight into the Price equation?
-
Mice live 9 months in the wild, and have a resting heart rate of 500-700 bpm. That’s a lot of cardio.
i love this idea let’s become mice
No, we will become monke
they are widely known to be the smartest creatures on earth, followed by dolphins, and then us
they use a lot of other things… including living human cancer cells in a petri dish
I believe the vast majority of cultivated human cells are cancerous cells anyway.
when researching cancer drugs, yeah
So we will become cancer
The reality is that even if there was a magic bullet for cancer, all cancer, it would only extend lives a few years.
How does that work?
Maybe the real cancer is the friends we made along the way
well no, they kill cancer in petri dishes
It was a joke about selection pressure.
Mice, notorious for having evolved to suit unclean conditions and being able to survive as carriers of disease and parasites will definitely have a different set of evolved resistances and immunities to us. It’s pretty ludacris science believes them to be a good point of comparison.
You know lab mice aren’t just grabbed out of the sewers, right?
Not when the sewer mice have turtles to protect them
Humans only discovered hygiene somewhere in the last couple of thousand of years. Evolutionary pressure for large animals works on time lines of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Before we got cleaner (and also after that) we also lived in unclean conditions, often are still covered in fleas and lice and we are still one of the greatest spreaders of disease. Humans and mice are extremely similar in many ways, just because we have a large brain doesn’t mean we are somehow no longer the animals we always were. We share much of our evolution with mice, our cells are extremely similar and we share 92% of our DNA.
Mice are an excellent point of comparison to humans. And because they are small, live short lives and grow fast, they are excellent to serve as a basis for testing. However it’s also worth remembering the mice aren’t the starting point, nor are they the end point. It’s just one of the steps in between and many other species and techniques are used. In a lot of cases, mice aren’t used at all, but some other test is done.
It’s also like people seem to think that researchers are just doing random crap to mice and seeing what works. Like I said there is a lot of stuff that comes before and a lot of stuff that comes after. Tests with mice are often done to research something very specific, with a carefully considered method of testing and expected outcome. If someone thinks of something so hyper specific to humans, they would simply not do any trials on mice since that wouldn’t yield any results. These days we’ve also gotten extremely good at growing cells and complex clumps of cells at large scales for not much money. And these can be actual human cells with actual human DNA and biological processes. This has made animal testing far less necessary than it was in the past.
Sure at some point if something is very promising but there are doubts about some complex interaction that might be an issue, animal testing can be useful. But if the thing to test is something so specific to humans, an animal closer to humans would be used, for example pigs or some monkeys or apes. And if those doubts aren’t there it isn’t like animal testing is a required step, it is possible to go to human trials without it.
Of course this depends heavily on what it is you are trying to do. For drugs for example animal testing is often done, but often not to figure out if it works or not. But to figure out what sort of dose is needed for enough to be absorbed, but not so much the drug is wasted or the patient would experience a lot of side effects. It’s pretty easy to do a short trial on some pigs and have the first human trial get the dose right straight away. At this point it’s more of a regular way of doing things than something absolutely required. In a lot of places regulation will require some animal testing, especially for drugs, but these days with better lab tests and simulations it isn’t strictly required.
So it might be a fun shower thought, but it isn’t really how stuff works in real life.
Flea and lice are not indicators of cleanliness. The same way a mosquito or tick or croc bite is not. They do not care about how (un)clear you are. Why should they?
See also, humanized mice, KO mice with particular genes knocked out to see if gene therapy works, and a host of other intentionally bred or adapted strains.
This is one of the reasons why animal testing is not worth the torture the animals go through
I don’t think that follows logically…
The fact that we are not the animals they test on so they can never guarantee it’ll react to humans the same way it does to the animals? That doesn’t follow logically?
It is theoretically possible that we are basal in such away that mice are derived given a certain ailment, that a treatment doesn’t work on mice. However we are so damn closely related to mice that probability is vanishingly small, and in such cases where it is known about, they actually genetically modify the mouse to account for it.
They used to do fertility tests on hamster ovum to see if a human male’s sperm was viable. We are fucking close enough to hamsters a human sperm can cause a hamster ovum to start to divide.
Granted, I will agree with you: much animal testing is fucking horrific and deplorable. But it is generally reliable.
No, it does not. Saying we might not find x treatment because it didn’t work on mice says absolutely nothing about the actual efficacy of testing on mice.
It does if it diverts attention away from other potential cures, not to mention making the animals’ sacrifices even more in vain
How can we develop therapeutics without animal testing? Genuinely asking your thoughts.
(not mice), but Fancy Rats are extremely susceptible to tumors. It sucks. More rats I’ve owned have died of either cancer or respiratory illnesses than old age.
Bonus shot of my boy Finn:
He has a kind face.
Like he works in French restaurant.
You say that but he always wears a leather jacket and carries a flickknife with him when he goes outside!!
so does my mom.
I can fix him
I love him
Cancer isn’t one thing.
The whole concept of “curing cancer” is such a trope. Cancer is a condition, and it annoys the fuck out of me that people treat it as one disease like measles or the flu.
Or it was too cheap to duplicate so there was no profit in it…
Cheap to duplicate is great for them. That means larger profit margins.
Even when we find a single drug that effortlessly cures every type of cancer and costs $1 to peoduce it will be patented by some giant company and sold to highest bidders.
There’s more profit in causing and treating cancer than curing it. Can’t weaken those revenue streams just so some poor people can go on living. If they were worth saving then they wouldn’t have been born better.
Dead people make short term profit. Alive people make long term profit.
Or it worked too well on mice and stopped regular cells from dividing.
We know a bunch of ways to kill cancer cells. Unfortunately, we usually want to avoid killing the non-cancerous ones, which is considerably harder to do.
This is where oregano oil and apple cider vinegar technology comes from.
reminds me of trump’s suggestion of using bleach to treat people with covid
We warned the stupids off doing that way too quick if you ask me.
Now now, you can’t be picky! And really with the outcome being the same, there’s no reason to bicker.
The crazy thing is we actually do have things that work in humans but not in mice. Mice are omnivores and are very different in terms of optimal energy state. They tend to run in glucose more easily than on fat and their whole biology is built to be small and fast, with short life spans.
Checking how DNA repair works in an animal which lives for maybe 2 years is great for understanding DNA repair in short lived organisms, but we have tk repair damage for 50 times as long. It is just so much more complex and requires such different tools when you switch from maybe 2 years to maybe 80 years, it really isn’t sane to assume it will all carry over.
Now for an accute toxin, say tobacco, sure, some things work just fine. There is not a huge difference between humans and mice when subjected to cyanide or arsenic. Being crushed by a falling piano is going to kill both of us. But a chronic poison? That will take decades to kill? That is very different. We can shed cells in a different way to how they can. We have more mass to store things. We have more energy storage. We have bigger kidneys with more opportunities for filtering. We are different.
When we enter ketosis we have some fairly significant cancer responses. When we maintain fasting for 5+ days we have a fairly large bump in autophagy, a state where the body kills off and recycles damaged cells. This state can cause some types of cancer to be more obvious to our immune systems and allow the tumor to be attacked. In some cases otherwise inoperable tumors can be removed after shrinking them through fasting. This does not replicate in mice. So yes, some treatments (not cures because that doesn’t really apply) do work in humans and not in mice.
The strongest risk factor of human cancer is age. Wild mice live 6-9 months.
There are preventative measures but they’re all based on the rich not poisoning everyone for profit.
Also who is out there making sure all of these incredible discoveries are accessible to mice more broadly, outside the labs?
This IS happening, right?
Otoh, mice have never been healthier.
Nobody tell him what happens to the mice afterwards.
They go live on a farm to live out the rest of their happy mousey days.
As fertilizer.
Cancer can’t be cured because it isn’t 1 thing. And animal testing regardless of the benefit humans may receive is morally wrong.
There are many types of cancer with very high remission rates after treatment.
Treatment isn’t a cure.
And animal testing regardless of the benefit humans may receive is morally wrong.
You can say whatever you want, but just because you feel it really hard doesnt mean it will be convincing to other people.
In this particular case, I think animal testing is moral as fuck, because why in the fuck would I possibly value animal lives even close to that of a human or myself.
Why do you matter more than any other animal?
Because I care about me more than any other animal.
If someone tried to kill you, would you just let them or not?
Any sane answer says you value you more than someone else.
Its crazy you find this opinion applied to animals to be offensive.
Humans, particularly those in modern societies, live outside of natural order. We don’t contribute anything to it and just use it up. We slaughter millions of animals that we first rape to keep manufacturing them like their products. The animals were experiment in often never see the sky or feel the earth. You matter more than them?
Yeah, I’m the crazy one…
Yup, that sounds crazy AF.
Its a wonder you think you’ll convert anyone just by sounding batshit insane.
I’m human. You think I would think my own species matters less than a different one? No other species thinks differently, why would we feel any different, especially given our massively different capabilities thought wise?
I know I won’t change anyone’s mind.
What other species kills at the level humans do? The shear fact you mention our capabilities proves my point; we do horrible things when we have the capability to choose not to.
I know I won’t change anyone’s mind.
So why are you spouting off about it? To what end?
What other species kills at the level humans do? The shear fact you mention our capabilities proves my point; we do horrible things when we have the capability to choose not to.
This could apply for so many things, but not testing for medical purposes. Thats you being irrationally idealistic past the point of stupidity.
So what, we just test things in a dish and then hope it works in a complex organism? Because the other alternative is human testing.
We do like every other animal on the planet and die.
The funny thing about this very dumb take, is if the people who believed it followed through, the idea would eventually die out.
Followed through with what? Talk about dumb takes.
Dying vs using medicines that had any animal testing involved in their creation.
This wasn’t particularly complex, but maybe complex for someone with your take.
You have fun with that, I’ll take the medicine.
