Far too often, conclusions are made or drawn to humans from studies that have little to no relevance to actual clinical meaning. While it is nice and fun to speculate from these studies, attempts to translate them into actual clinical applications typically leads to placebo effects, dead ends, and possible harm. I hope this thread will shed some light on these practices.
Couzin-Frankel J. When Mice Mislead. Science 2013;342(6161):922-5. When Mice Mislead
Tackling a long-standing disconnect between animal and human studies, some charge that animal researchers need stricter safeguards and better statistics to ensure their science is solid.
For years, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, drug regulators, and even the general public have lamented how rarely therapies that cure animals do much of anything for humans. Much attention has focused on whether mice with different diseases accurately reflect what happens in sick people.
Others suggest there's another equally acute problem. Many animal studies are poorly done, they say, and if conducted with greater rigor they'd be a much more reliable predictor of human biology.
It's hard to generalize, of course: Animal studies cut across a massive swath of biology, tracking everything from the activity of single molecules in a healthy organ to side effects of a new drug poised for human testing.
And many who stake their careers on animal studies conduct them with care, judiciously weighing how to structure their experiments and chasing the science wherever their furry subjects take it.
That said, even animal research that has a big effect on human drug studies is governed by far fewer standards than clinical trials in people. There, volunteers are randomly assigned by computer to get a new drug or a placebo. Those running a trial are often blinded to who's in what category, preventing clinicians invested in a therapy's success from imagining hints of efficacy in patients they know are getting a new drug.
And look up any clinical trial seeking volunteers and you'll see a long list of "inclusion" and "exclusion" criteria governing who can participate. If you have high blood pressure or if your cancer is being treated with a certain drug, you might be out of luck.
Animal studies rarely follow these rules. For ethical and cost reasons, researchers try to use as few animals as possible, which can mean minuscule sample sizes. Unblinded, unrandomized studies are the norm. "The way we do our research with our animals is stone-age."
From various quarters, there's pressure to change that. High-profile studies showing that preclinical results often cannot be reproduced are driving funders and researchers to seek solutions—as much to mend their public image as to guarantee sound science.
Couzin-Frankel J. When Mice Mislead. Science 2013;342(6161):922-5. When Mice Mislead
Tackling a long-standing disconnect between animal and human studies, some charge that animal researchers need stricter safeguards and better statistics to ensure their science is solid.
For years, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, drug regulators, and even the general public have lamented how rarely therapies that cure animals do much of anything for humans. Much attention has focused on whether mice with different diseases accurately reflect what happens in sick people.
Others suggest there's another equally acute problem. Many animal studies are poorly done, they say, and if conducted with greater rigor they'd be a much more reliable predictor of human biology.
It's hard to generalize, of course: Animal studies cut across a massive swath of biology, tracking everything from the activity of single molecules in a healthy organ to side effects of a new drug poised for human testing.
And many who stake their careers on animal studies conduct them with care, judiciously weighing how to structure their experiments and chasing the science wherever their furry subjects take it.
That said, even animal research that has a big effect on human drug studies is governed by far fewer standards than clinical trials in people. There, volunteers are randomly assigned by computer to get a new drug or a placebo. Those running a trial are often blinded to who's in what category, preventing clinicians invested in a therapy's success from imagining hints of efficacy in patients they know are getting a new drug.
And look up any clinical trial seeking volunteers and you'll see a long list of "inclusion" and "exclusion" criteria governing who can participate. If you have high blood pressure or if your cancer is being treated with a certain drug, you might be out of luck.
Animal studies rarely follow these rules. For ethical and cost reasons, researchers try to use as few animals as possible, which can mean minuscule sample sizes. Unblinded, unrandomized studies are the norm. "The way we do our research with our animals is stone-age."
From various quarters, there's pressure to change that. High-profile studies showing that preclinical results often cannot be reproduced are driving funders and researchers to seek solutions—as much to mend their public image as to guarantee sound science.
