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Comment by pezzana | Hacker News Reader

> The team, including Juntendo University professor Toru Minamino, confirmed that mice administered with the vaccine showed decreases in the zombie cells, medically known as senescent cells, and in areas affected by arterial stiffening.

By now this has become a trope. "Researchers develop new treatment for {UNTREATED_DISEASE}" ... in mice.

Mouse models of human disease are very limited in their predictive ability. There's a lot of research that needs to follow this before there's even a hope of a human trial, let alone vaccine. And the failure rate for treatments at the mouse stage is quite high.

Some of the comments on this thread treat this research paper as the announcement of an an imminent anti-aging vaccine. It's not.

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There are many imminent aging therapies in clinical trials though or upcoming. Not saying it will reverse it but it may slow it down and compress the morbidity period. Such therapies include the promising Mayo Clinic trial on using large doses of Fisetin to get rid of senescent cells, or similarly Dasatnib + Quercetin, gene therapy like PGC-1a for maintaining muscle mass in older age, epigenetic reprogramming, mTOR inhibitors like Sirolimus or other rapalogues, etc.

So it’s very likely that some of the advances we see today that are still in clinical stage will hit the market in 5 to 15 years.

Edit: typo

Gotta admit though, there has never been a better time to be a mouse.

Really? Because they get experimented on and then slaughtered by the thousands

Actually, by the million (monthly)

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-many-mice-and-ra...

At least some get lucky and sometimes slow down aging - for example - when things work out.

I don't want to think about what the others go through when things go wrong, though...

Pretty sure they'll still get killed once the experiment is completed.

The term used in papers is often 'sacrificed'.

You forgot tiny detail that they live in prison for entire life eating equivalent of Mc Donalds or worse.

This is true. Everything held constant nothing changing and its far too cold. Its worse than being in US prison, somehow

Just knowing I'd have guaranteed food and housing would make my life less miserable than it is now. Oh, and I love McDonald's.

Unless they're "participants" in an experiment related to McDonald's, it's probably closer to say they spend their life eating the equivalent of Soylent.

Though 1/3 of my meals are Soylent, so even that doesn't seem entirely terrible.

The food/diet component of their existence is really the absolute least of their problems.

by mouse life standards, they live like kings

You mean, by what some humans think is mouse standard.

Sounds like suburb utopia.

Prior to that inevitable slaughter some of them get to experience things that most humans never get to experience.

Mice on MDMA for example could easily be having the best time that any mouse has ever had.

> 0.01% of them got to have some cool hallucinations though - look on the bright side!

Hmm

Yes and this response has also become a trope. It’s generically universal to nearly any early result.

Completely agree that the response is a trope at this point.

I've seen more comment section finger wagging in response to science articles, offering such wisdom as correlation isn't causation, XYZ "isn't a panacea", research into treatments to mitigate or avoid cancer "don't cure cancer", statistical confidence of 95% falls short of absolute proof, and any number of extraneous add-ons that make caricatures of the research and then bat those caricatures down.

It reminds me of this quip from the Onion, back in 2009:

"All that in just six years? Wow, that's so amazing. If you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic. And I'm being sarcastic because I don't understand the significance of the study."

https://www.theonion.com/cow-genome-outlined-1819560275

developers expect scaling up to be like Ctrl-C Ctrl-V

> By now this has become a trope. "Researchers develop new treatment for {UNTREATED_DISEASE}" ... in mice.

And a twitter account:

https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice

https://jamesheathers.medium.com/in-mice-explained-77b61b598...

This is well known and very well established. We don’t like experimenting on humans. It’s kind of ghoulish and evil.

I get what you’re saying but it’s safe to assume that this concept is already baked into almost everyone’s discussion on matters like this.

>It’s kind of ghoulish and evil.

Experiments on humans happen very frequently. They're called "clinical trials".

or A/B tests

After a huge amount of non human testing.

> in mice

It will be interesting to know how long can we extend that live of mice. I guess that before immortal human beings we should achieve mice immortality.

I keep wondering if future generations will assume we had a special worship for mice considering how many diseases we tried to cure in mice :p

Oh no, future generations will curse our barbarity for doing the experiments (from the comfort of their greatly-extended lifespans).

the first engineered superintelligent mouse will discover that humans have solved all his problems and will make a mouse pharma empire out of their discoveries.

I guess if it does NOT work on mice, it's highly unlikely to work on humans? In this case, it might be good predictor of failure, which can save a lot of money. Just speculating...

Also, if something really bad goes on mice, we can avoid having that happening to humans. Which I would also value a lot.

I mean, it seems to me experimenting on mice might be worth it.

> I guess if it does NOT work on mice, it's highly unlikely to work on humans?

There is virtually no relationship whatsoever between what works in mice and humans. Such headlines are completely ridiculous by now: the track record of applicability is a train wreck.

This very much depends on the mouse model of disease. Obesity drugs for instance are highly predictive.

No, this is wrong. The point is to figure out what chemicals react with living creatures in what way. We're not creating super-mice, we're not making the rats of NIMH, we're blindly fumbling about for one of the septillions of light switches we haven't flipped yet to see what it does.

Figuring these things out is hard.

Humans are good at doing things they've done before, or imitating actions they've seen or heard before, but learning something entirely new is very very difficult. We have more scientists alive and working on problems now than ever before in human history and still the mill of innovation turns slowly.

This is basic science; early research. Not immediately applicable, and harder for many people to see the benefit, but important. Humans share much fundamental biology with other mammals. Moue tests aren't guaranteed to be directly applicable, but it's what we've got.

> Humans share much fundamental biology with other mammals.

It's like saying a rock and a plant share fundamental atoms with each other. Biology even from one close specie to another is so mindbogglingly unpredictable that we don't have good models. In 2021.

Even the ever exaggerating pop sci article does not mention an increase in lifespan... At face value this seems more like evidence against the senescent cells theory of aging.

I am curious, why are they still using mice and not tiny monkeys? If they are using some animals, why use random mice and not a primate? Any specific reason other than tradition?

Funny enough, The Economist just had an article about this and an attempt to make lemurs a model species: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/a-tiny-prim...

Mostly legal and ethical barriers are vastly higher for non human primates

Sounds like an opportunity for those living in friendlier jurisdictions. Lab-as-a-service in a warm country with a relaxed legal regime for biomedical studies?

dwonvoting for curiosity is dangerous. If one finds this comment distasteful, it is much more valuable for future readers to explain why, rather than downvote and keep scrolling.

So we should start with mould? What are you saying exactly? We have to start somewhere...

I just want the breathless headlines to include “in mice” (or appropriate animal) if it wasn’t in humans.

OK got it! Both of you have well described it -- and I agree with you. :)

I didn't interpret the parent comment as arguing against mice models, just that there is a huge gap between finding something that works in mice and then applying it to humans (with tons and tons of false starts), that any pronouncements that imply that human treatments are on the horizon are premature.

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