3 ms·

I imagine that the success rate varies according to the disease. If it was a flu vaccine then it would be laughed out at 50%, but for cancer I'm guessing 50% is

• sswezey 13y ago
  My mother just died of ocular melanoma, but was in a trial for all melanomas. The trial drug had an effective rate of 40% and that was considered a huge increase over the previous of about 15-20%. 50% for a melanoma _vaccine_ is great.
• dnautics 13y ago
  unfortunately, 50% in mice is rather low for cancer even. You usually want to start out at 70-80% in mice for cancer. If you get 50% in humans that's a great success rate, but not in mice. The reason for this is that the mouse model is called a xenograft model, you take a human cancer and implant it into the mouse. Typically, you are running the experiment on mice implanted with the cell line that gave the best hit in your in vitro model, so it better do darned well, relatively speaking. I could be wrong about this though, usually the xenograft is done in immunocompromised mice (because otherwise the mice would reject the human cancer line)... So there could be complicating factors.