> All of this notwithstanding the growing knowledge that no, you can't just give mice cancer/MS/autism and check if a drug works there, expecting the same result in humans.
...to state the obvious, scientists aren't giving drugs to mice and then shipping them off to pharmacies. They're testing the drugs in mice first to see if it's worth testing in humans. Then, the human trials are used to determine efficacy.
It's not a perfect system to be sure, but what is the alternative? Bypass animal testing and go straight to human trials? I'd have a lot of obvious ethical issues with that.
I'd argue that minimally positive results in these experiments should not be taken as any indication that the same therapy will work in humans unless they can convince an _extremely_ skeptical and thorough committee of experts that this result is likely translatable. That would immediately disqualify all xenograft models, and probably most native tumor models as well. So what should we do then? If I have solved it I would be running a successful company selling that secret sauce. But if I were to bet money then I'd say the best approach would be to come up with well thought out in vitro (and some mouse model) experiments that will clearly test all the known ways this drug will interact with every system in the human body; especially the immune system if it's a monoclonal. The emphasis should be on complete declaration of bankruptcy on any hope of a model system showing therapeutic efficacy that's correlated with expected human efficacy.
Test on pets. Seriously our pets get all the same diseases we do (as always there are some exceptions). Millions of pets every year get cancer (just one example) and we make almost no use of this resource.
The other approach is to start testing in humans at a very, very low dose. While this would work it would require a change in the regulatory environment.
...to state the obvious, scientists aren't giving drugs to mice and then shipping them off to pharmacies. They're testing the drugs in mice first to see if it's worth testing in humans. Then, the human trials are used to determine efficacy.
It's not a perfect system to be sure, but what is the alternative? Bypass animal testing and go straight to human trials? I'd have a lot of obvious ethical issues with that.