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 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
Jonathan
Jonathan Latham, PhD
Executive Director
The Bioscience Resource Project
Ithaca, NY 14850 USA

www.independentsciencenews.org
and
www.bioscienceresource.org

[log in to unmask]
Skype: jonathanlatham2
Tel: 1-607-319-0279

"Good with Science"