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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

While mice are not humans (who would have known), we could do a lot better by moving away from using inbred mice.

More positively we could make a lot more use of domestic pets in research. If we started to treat more pets as research subjects we could really do a lot of great research.

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The purpose of inbred strains is to isolate the effects of the drug and the environment from the genetic effects. Drugs are routinely tested on multiple such strains.

There is a huge variety of mouse strains in use and under development. Basically anything you would see in a "fancy mouse" you can have as a strain.

Pets, like cats and dogs, owned by private owners, are used for studies all the time. And not just for veterinary purposes. Dogs have a wide variety of tumors, and studies on these can be used to inform research for Human oncology.

Beagles, kept in laboratory populations, are routinely used to study the cardiological safety of drugs. Such studies are rarely fatal, and dogs often have several of them during their time in the lab. They live in "colonies" of about 10 dogs each, and they look and behave just like very happy pets, even if a lot less trained. In the cases of the colonies I have been in contact with, they live in the lab for about 6 years, then they are spayed/neutered, get a complete dental and are adopted by private owners, often vets and vet students whom they already know.

The problem is in most cases a new drug is not tested on multiple strains. Often we get the result for the CL57/black mouse and nothing more. The end results is often meaningless since it is strain specific.

Yes I know pets are used in studies, but we use pets to only a fraction of their potential. We have 10s of millions of pets and we use a few thousand at most every year. I am lamenting the waste.

This works up until the part of the research where you cut the pet open to see what the effects were.

The thing with inbred mice is that the results are more consistent (or at least more so) than with regular mice. This allows you to use less mice and get statistical significance. If you do not use those than the sample size you'd need drastically increases. Animal research is plenty expensive as it is.

Yes I know why inbred bred mice are used, but the end result is often a more accurate result that is meaningless. Use more outbred mice and do fewer experiements.

Good luck in study section, especially with mouse specialists. I hope you have a mighty compelling argument for why a random sample of (say) house mice is going to be free of unmeasured confounding effects...

Humans have a shit ton of unmeasured confounding effects though. Which means there is an even bigger leap between inbred mice and human studies. Not saying we should abandon the current way of doing things, but a little more diversity in funded research might be a good thing, because there are some modes of failure right now.

A way to evaluate drug efficacy that relies less on comparisons of large groups would be a big step, because there are a lot of disorders that are probably multiple mechanisms manifesting in similar ways

Ultimately there is always going to be some trade-off between making a rigorous statement and a generalizeable one, especially because biology seems to have some pretty messy abstractions. As collecting and analyzing large amounts of data becomes more feasible, I don't see why there shouldn't be some efforts to consider genetic (or environmental) heterogeneity in animal models. Ideally I think it'd be cool to approach any given question with parallel methods that can try to address how the hypothesis holds up both in more narrow but well controlled situations, and in the "wild"

I hope the person demanding using inbred mice has a compelling argument for why inbred mice are a good model of outbred humans.

Yes we would do fewer experiments since you would need more mice per experiement, but the results of those experiements would be far more robust.

Good luck getting people to allow their pets being used for research!

People are actually very motivated to contribute to science, here's an example of research involving pets and extending their healthspan across aging: http://dogagingproject.com

Phase I clinical trial: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/28374166/

Phase II is in progress.

Interview with Matt Kaeberlein from the project: https://www.leafscience.org/dr-matt-kaeberlein-the-dog-aging...

This is a study of a new application of a drug that has already had very extensive trials in both humans and several species of animals that have demonstrated it to be safe (it's FDA approved for human use). I think you will find people dramatically less willing to test brand new drugs on their pets.

This question has already been asked of pet owners and when it is explained to them why most are willing to let their pets participate in trials of even new drugs.

Beagles are already commonly used in medical research.

People are really keen to allow their pets to be used in research as long as they understand the importance. Pets are a massive resource that is just being wasted.

My cats are certainly not being wasted. Who else would step across my keyboard when I’m typing?

You should consider yourself lucky to be able to use your cat's keyboard while she is taking her afternoon stroll.

I find this attitude astonishing. My pets are members of my family, and I'd generally rail against experimenting on my family.

Would you let your child participate in a clinical trial if they had a disease for which there was no good treatment? Pets suffer from most of the diseases humans suffer from (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc) and they also have no good treatment options. We should be using these sick pets in trials to find new cures for pets and humans.

Maybe you weren't clear or I misread you. I understood you to be saying that pets were generally not being used to their potential. (E.g. perfectly healthy pets could be used as research subjects, because they aren't doing anything else valuable at the moment..)

Of course not. No one would think experimenting on healthy pets would be reasonable or ethical, but not using our sick pets to help other pets and humans is a huge waste.

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