Saturday, July 8, 2017

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.

7 comments:

  1. To hold back human trials on newer experimental drugs that are working in mice is unethical also.

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    1. Yes, but it would be nice to limit the human trials to those that had the possibility of working, meaning that mice and humans both had the receptors.

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  2. Gretchen thank you so much for the simple insight to a very complex field (even i could understand it) Hindsight is always great because one can see where you should have and should't have spend

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  3. Would be a bit entertaining if elephants were found to be an even better analogue to humans. Of course you'd have to build bigger labs.

    More seriously, mice are adapted to eat grains, Humans are adapted to eat fats. In both cases NOT eating their ancestral diet makes them ill.

    chris c

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    1. Well, better to spend tax dollars on giant elephant pens than spending it on wars.

      In the wild, humans are omnivores and some don't eat a lot of fat, whereas others don't eat a lot of carbs. But in the wild they don't have easy access to overdoing it.

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  4. I saw a Jim Johnson paper the other day

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4572061/

    didn't previously know mice have TWO insulin-controlling genes, that may explain some of the differences

    chris c

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