The human element: A biotech upstart hopes to carve a path around faulty animal models
It’s been a rough few years for lab mice in the literature. Report after report scapegoated science’s furry subjects for the piling number of drugs that fail the clinic. A Science study proposed building a new “wildling” lab mouse. A well-covered Nature paper indicated the differences between mice and human brains were responsible for billions of dead-ended Alzheimer research dollars. One Translational Medicine review cited the success rate of translating cancer drugs at 8% and another concluded that “even if the next several decades were spent improving the internal and external validity of animal models, the clinical relevance of those models would, in the end, only improve to some extent.” [italics theirs]
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