Mice are in the same clade as primates, and share around 95-99% of the same genome as primates.
We're all part of the Euarchontoglires clade
We're all part of the Euarchontoglires clade
This is especially true for cancer, brain, and inflammation research. Mice just don't make good models for that.
They are a good initial test for viability because of the overwhelming genetic similarity.
This is why mice and rodents are used to test initial viability before then moving on to theraputics development.
You can read some sources if you want [0][1][2]
[0] - https://www.jax.org/why-the-mouse/excellent-models
[1] - https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/research-at-cambridge/animal-...
[2] - https://www.genome.gov/10001345/importance-of-mouse-genome
They are used because they're the _only_ way to test drugs early in development. Animal cruelty laws make it nearly impossible to use non-murine species for initial drug tests.
Additionally, mice are easy to breed and to keep, and there's a great variety of specialized genetic lines.
Idk why you are trying to die on this hill. I've provided decently authoritative sources (The Jackson Institute, Cambridge University, and the NIH)
Unless you have a PhD in Systems Biology or Genomics, I'm going to trust them over you.
Edit: an actual OG in the field of genomics just commented - listen/chat with him, not me.
But mice make really bad models for anything to do with brain, aging, inflammation, and cancer. That's why comments "in mice" are appropriate in these areas.
And it's not at all controversial, here are my citations:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1222878110 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6615039/
Mice studies are not useless, for sure. But they're almost always are not directly translatable to humans.
> But mice make really bad models for anything to do with brain, aging, inflammation, and cancer
If mice is really bad for research in the fields you mentioned, why do scientists around the world continue to use it? Wouldn’t they know it’s a dead end?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074346/#:~:tex....
Mice gave us a very solid understanding of cancer genetics. Cancer was initially thought of as an almost purely environmental disease. Thanks to “in mice” we learned that genetic susceptibility is a major factor.
Transplantation biology and immunology have profited enormously from mouse models—-and more “recently” everything from monoclonal antibodies to CAR-T cells.
And when you say “brain” who could been a dozen different things. I can assure you that mouse models are highly useful and translationally relevant to many neurological, behavioral, developmental, and physiological studies of the mammalian brain.
I worked in cancer research-adjacent area (on computational biology). The problem with mice was that cancers in mice necessarily contain fewer cells than human cancers.
So a lot of treatments can simply clear these cancers completely, without giving them a chance to evolve resistance. Yes, you can try to compensate for that, but it just is not reliable.
In addition, mice are notoriously naturally susceptible to cancer. So their cancers, counter-intuitively, are often less evolved as a result.
> And when you say “brain” who could been a dozen different things.
I basically mean "degenerative brain diseases", very much including aging.
At least when using rodent you can control the environmental factors in a randomized controller “clinic” trials. Compliance not so hard to ensure.