[ShareTompkins] The Failing Animal Research Paradigm for Human Disease

[A Wilson]

Dear Friends and Colleagues

Published today (May 20th) by Independent Science News

The Failing Animal Research Paradigm for Human Disease
By John Pippin, MD

URL: http://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-failing-animal-research-paradigm-for-human-disease/

Synopsis:  Behind the hype, science has arguably provided limited  
practical benefit for patients considering the vast sums spent on  
medical research. The war on cancer has not been won, most non- 
infectious diseases of humans cannot be cured, neither can most be  
explained at a causal level. This slow rate of medical progress is  
usually attributed to intractable causes, such as the lack of  
molecular understanding of diseases, or the baffling complexity of  
biological organisms. But these explanations are unconvincing because  
many diseases have been cured or nearly so in experimental ("model")  
animals. What if lack of overrall progress is instead due to a much  
more specific reason: that successful treatments of mice do not  
translate into successful treatments for humans?
	This simple but neglected explanation is outlined in a new  
publication and described here (Chandrasekara and Pippin 2013). The  
authors propose that mice and other animals are biologically too  
different from each other to serve as proxies for human disease. Using  
the example of type 2 diabetes, they show that though mice are the  
major objects of medical diabetes research, they are at every  
biological level, including those of anatomy, physiology,  
biochemistry, and genetics, significantly different from humans.
	Chandrasekara and Pippin conclude that the strikingly consistent  
failure to translate mouse research to human type 2 diabetes  
prevention and treatment cannot be remedied except by “humanizing”  
type 2 diabetes research—that is, studying the disease using a  
combination of human cell cultures and tissues, in vitro and stem cell  
methods, laboratory and clinical population studies, and other  
approaches that are directly relevant for human diabetes patients.  
This conclusion, the authors argue, applies more broadly still—to most  
human disease research. Medical research is therefore failing, and  
will continue to fail, because of a misguided reliance on animal  
research.

The author is Director of Academic Affairs for the Physicians  
Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Please share this important artcle

Thank you and best wishes



Allison Wilson, PhD
Science Director
The Bioscience Resource Project

phone: 1 (607) 319 0279
a.wilson at bioscienceresource.org
www.independentsciencenews.org
and
www.bioscienceresource.org

"Good with Science"

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