FDA no longer needs to require animal tests before human drug trials | Hacker News Reader

FDA no longer needs to require animal tests before human drug trials

science.org

38 pointsrguiscard20 comments

According to Eric Weinstein, the breeding of lab animals specifically for use in testing drugs resulted in non-typical genetics, which invalidates most of the testing they were used in anyway.

Wild mice have different genetics than those fed mouse chow for generations, and bred for economic production.

These are safety not efficacy studies.

Unless inbreeding somehow made these lab animals immune from toxicity they are still good models.

The breeding DID increase their ability to repair damage to toxicity, at the cost of all getting cancer, but after the age at which they were bred to live to.

If you take a wild mouse, and feed it, it'll live a long time, the lab mice will eventually get cancer everywhere, and die of cancer. (or so the claim goes)

Do you have a source to show that inbreed mice have higher resistance to toxic drugs?

I’d be interested to read it.

I'm relaying what I understand to be the truth, which obviously could be wrong. The pieces seem to be out there, as near as I (a person who never studied biology) can tell

Example: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10915818211009... Telomere Length and Arsenic: Improving Animal Models of Toxicity by Choosing Mice With Shorter Telomeres

The abstract discusses telomere length and sensitivity to arsenic toxicity.

If my understanding is wrong, I'd be interested in guidance to correct it. I'm interested in understanding how things really work, and Weinstein's explanations (before the Covid thing hit) made sense of otherwise paradoxical facts.

That doesn't make much sense, you're not testing for efficacy in general mice populations. Both wild and lab-bred mice have different genetics to humans anyway.

> the breeding of lab animals specifically for use in testing drugs resulted in non-typical genetics, which invalidates most of the testing they were used in anyway

I thought they were bred atypically so that they could serve as a uniform test environment? (Zero expertise in this field.)

Yes, lab mice are inbred and you can get ones very similar in most places, to replicate studies, etc. Similar to standard cell cultures.

Well, just get an intern to put out traps and get some wild ones!

Who is Eric Weinstein?

The wrong brother... I should have said Bret Weinstein oops

A member of the USA intelligentsia.

“Animal models are wrong more often than they are right,” says Don Ingber, a Harvard University bioengineer whose lab developed organ chip technology now being commercialized by the company Emulate, where he sits on the board and owns stock.

I’m shocked! Shocked this guy would be against animal testing and prefer people use his product.

it is conceptually possible that such a product could improve drug development?(eg, lower failure rates, lower costs, speed studies) Inventing something to solve a problem and pitching it isn't a sole reason to be suspected of foul play.

And? This seems internally consistent and understandable.

You cannot mimic an entire organism with a bunch of isolated cells.

You see no conflict of interest?

Cell models work great for things like cell permeability, but are far from being able to replicate whole organism toxicity. Which is what the article states.

We already have some major issues with drug efficacy (and maybe safety) in certain populations. This is because the vast majority of drugs are only tested on 20-something males, (usually white middle class ones, college attending, otherwise healthy ones). I wonder how that issue will be impacted by further reducing other forms of testing. And I wonder if this will make drug testing more difficult to recruit for (asking someone to try a new drug that has been tested in animals vs one that has not).

I'm not sure how to interpret 'the vast majority of drugs' as it is a pretty broad brush including everything from over the counter itch creams to genetically engineered cell therapies. For the subset of "cancer therapy drugs" I would guess that demographic bias does not hold, as first in human is generally people who have had all available drugs fail them and are often considering toxic chemotherapy or palliation. recruiting there is generally easier. I hope that elimination of animal data doesn't decrease safety- there are flaws in animal models and use for sure.

I wonder how many more recalls will happen with the FDA process after this change.

edit: and still probably better tested than the covid vax. /sarcasm

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