5 ms·

It makes a sort of sense to start inexpensively with a species for which so many incurable human diseases are actually turning out to be curable. Even if a cure

It makes a sort of sense to start inexpensively with a species for which so many incurable human diseases are actually turning out to be curable. Even if a cure is found that does not work in humans it helps map the shape of underlying difference between genetically divergent species. If a human body cannot respond to a cure that a mouse body can, the answer to the question of why not could be valuable.

vlovich123 6y ago
Maybe. Or we’re studying a search space with ever diminishing returns of success in the approach. We may have exhausted the utility that animal testing gives for lots of things due to divergent evolution meaning that very few, and ever decreasing, remaining therapies that work in animal models are extractable to humans. Maybe we need several orders of magnitude better models of how the human body works and chemistry works mathematically (and I know this is being worked on with lots of approaches being investigated). Then you can simulate drugs and skip several levels of expensive drug development. Any startup or community of startups that crack this nut can likely eat the current medical research community. Or you can go the unethical and often illegal human testing route which is also a more mixed bag of results than would be ideal.
- inciampati 6y ago
  Maybe it wouldn't be so easy to accurately simulate an organism made of trillions of cells, each containing millions to billions of proteins which oscillate, diffuse, and interact with each other millions of times a second. I don't think we are anywhere close to having exhausted the lessons we are learning from mouse models. They must always be taken with the caveat that mice and humans have significant differences in biology. But if we want to understand how complex organisms work, there isn't much better than an cohort of actual organisms to manipulate and observe in controlled environments. This gives insight and helps us to understand other species, including our own, by analogy.
stubish 6y ago
Given the number of things we find that work on mice but not humans, I wonder how many things that would work on humans we haven't followed up on because they did not work on mice?

vlovich123 6y ago

Maybe. Or we’re studying a search space with ever diminishing returns of success in the approach. We may have exhausted the utility that animal testing gives for lots of things due to divergent evolution meaning that very few, and ever decreasing, remaining therapies that work in animal models are extractable to humans. Maybe we need several orders of magnitude better models of how the human body works and chemistry works mathematically (and I know this is being worked on with lots of approaches being investigated). Then you can simulate drugs and skip several levels of expensive drug development. Any startup or community of startups that crack this nut can likely eat the current medical research community. Or you can go the unethical and often illegal human testing route which is also a more mixed bag of results than would be ideal.

inciampati 6y ago
Maybe it wouldn't be so easy to accurately simulate an organism made of trillions of cells, each containing millions to billions of proteins which oscillate, diffuse, and interact with each other millions of times a second. I don't think we are anywhere close to having exhausted the lessons we are learning from mouse models. They must always be taken with the caveat that mice and humans have significant differences in biology. But if we want to understand how complex organisms work, there isn't much better than an cohort of actual organisms to manipulate and observe in controlled environments. This gives insight and helps us to understand other species, including our own, by analogy.

stubish 6y ago

Given the number of things we find that work on mice but not humans, I wonder how many things that would work on humans we haven't followed up on because they did not work on mice?