They aren’t biologically compatible with us and so often seems like treatments that work with mice stumble at human testing stage.
So why do we keep using mice? Why not a different animal more closely related to us?
In: Biology
Lab mice/rats are:
– Well-understood (if slightly inaccurate). We know where mice are and aren’t correlated to people, and we know how to take good care of mice so that they aren’t living in any more stress than is necessary for the study (to prevent side effects). We can even induce specific illness or predispositions to illnesses so that we can test against the actual condition, genetic or otherwise.
– Cheap. You can get a whole ton of lab mice/rats cheaply and quickly. They are low maintenance, low upkeep, and easy to deal with. When you’re doing a screening study, you’re interested in trying multiple conditions/drugs quickly, so you want fast turnaround time and fast procurement.
Other animals, like monkeys, will be used at other stages of the development process. But for first-pass trials, lab mice/rats are the most efficient candidate. Since those are the first time any given drug will be run in a live organism, that’s what you hear about the most. But that just obscures that other animal models do get used, just later on.
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