Of Mice and Humans

"New Research Describes the Differences Between Mice and Humans" screams a headline of an article in Eurekalert. 

Golly. I guess I'm ahead of my time because I've known the differences between mice and humans for decades. The mice are the furry ones with long tails, and the humans are the larger ones who fight and kill each other because they don't agree on politics or religion.

But once you get past the headline on Eurekalert, you find that researchers are finally accepting that mouse research often doesn't translate into human treatments. Mice have been cured of diabetes hundreds of time, but the drugs the researchers used just don't seem to work when they try them on humans. 

The problem is that it would be unethical to try new drugs on humans without some evidence that they might do something beneficial. Mice are relatively cheap to maintain, and we already know a lot about them. If we used only larger animals like pigs or dogs or monkeys, the cost of research would be even higher than it is now, and animal rights groups would protest. Very few people object to mistreating rodents.

Now researchers are beginning to find out why mouse research doesn't always translate into human cures. These researchers looked into a class of receptors found on beta cells in both mice and humans. They are called G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), but the names don't matter.

What they found was that some of these receptors are found in both mice and humans, but others are not. Some are found only in mice, and others are found only in humans. If they know which ones are found in both mice and humans, future researchers can limit their research to those receptors. There's no point in spending millions of dollars on some drug that affects a receptor found only in mice! That money could instead be used to study drugs that affect both species.

Of course not all drugs target GPCRs. But a large number do. Let's hope these findings channel research into fruitful drugs, and not duds.