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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

On behalf of all the mice, thank you very much for doing this. I'm all for modern medicine but the number of mice, primates and other mammals that we kill in the name of science every year does not sit right with me.

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I’ve always felt that if there was _any_ morally acceptable reason to harm and kill animals it is for the sake of (reasonable) medical research. In principle the ethics board is there to make sure this is true but in practice they rarely do anything about it. Perhaps the real way to solve that problem is hold the IrBs to a higher standard and make them do their job?

I always try to reverse a situation to see if it makes sense, and then I ask myself: what would we think if aliens came to earth to experiment on us with untested medicine, kill us afterwards and only when it is perfectly safe on us they would apply it to themselves. I believe a large fraction of humanity would say that that is unethical and they'd have all kinds of cognitive dissonance to deal with (and associated reasons why this is different) to explain why what we do is ok.

I personally don't think it is ok, but it apparently is a necessity, at the same time if this can be stopped then that would be great.

We feel exactly the same way. Not only is it unacceptable that over 110 million animals a year are sacrificed for research, but these models do a terrible job of translating to humans and in most cases cannot even model the disease of interest but are used regardless. I used to work in tuberculosis where mice are predominantly used even though they do not get the disease and the disease they do get has the exact opposite pathology as a human.

If it's ok with you I will point some investors in your direction that are doing deals in this space.

Please do, and I appreciate the introductions! My email is robert at parallel.bio.

I've sent you an email, we'll take it from there.

We agree that this would be an important step. That being said, there is a paucity of models that would make suitable replacements to animal models. People are working on this issue, but many more people need to be working on developing better in vitro systems. Even with our platform, animal models still have to be used for certain assays (e.g. ADME) but we hope that one day this will not be the case.

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