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How good are mice models? My uneducated thoughts are they are unlikely to generalize to humans - like testing carcinogens in petri dishes



"It depends."

I really can't answer more precisely than that without knowing what you consider to be a "good" model, and what you are interested in modeling. Perhaps a marginally more useful answer is that they can be _excellent_ metabolic and cellular models. It's a case of "if you know what your looking for, you can pick animal models that effectively have exactly what you're looking for". The "what", here, would be a metabolic pathway, for example.


Ah. That makes sense. It's a tool that tests certain things.

My question was what percentage of results in mice generalize to humans?

To confirm I'm interpreting your answer directly. It depends on how the scientists use the tool. It is good at verifying certain aspects but not others.


>My question was what percentage of results in mice generalize to humans?

Accuracy is very high when you are studying a metabolic pathway that is (near)identical in humans and in mice.

>To confirm I'm interpreting your answer directly. It depends on how the scientists use the tool. It is good at verifying certain aspects but not others.

Yes. More precisely: animal models are accurate when the metabolic machinery in humans is also found in the animal model.


I don't know if these issues have been fixed but here's a study that looked into all types of animal studies for cancer for an overview and suggested fixes and listed notable failures. There is one study here that showed a promising cancer treatment in mice used at 500x dilution in humans and it caused systemic organ failure in humans. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3902221/




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