Mice & Chemotherapy
Some of the greatest heroes in health care are not doctors, nurses, scientists or even EMTs. They are small, white and four-footed. Mice give up their lives by the thousands every day to help scientists understand human diseases and to ensure that the medicines and treatments people use are safe and effective. Mice have been especially helpful in the ongoing battle against cancer and in finding ways to improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy and find effective alternatives to it.
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Why Mice?
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Mice bear remarkable genetic and biological similarities to humans. They are small and can be easily stored either socially or individually. They also reproduce very quickly, not only making them plentiful and cheap but also allowing scientists to study genetic inheritance as it relates to disease
Learning about Cancer
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Mice have been used for cancer research since the late 1800s. Originally mice were used to test the effectiveness of drugs. Researchers would transplant tumors from one mouse to another to observe how cancer developed. An inbred species was later developed that had a greater tendency to develop tumors, aiding in scientists' study. In 1962, a mutant mouse with very low immunity was discovered. This mouse and its descendants did not reject transplanted human tumors. Scientists have since altered the genes of mice in order to create characteristics to aid them in the study of cancer.
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Testing Chemotherapy
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Mice with tumors are treated with different compounds to test their effectiveness. Mice that have human tumors transplanted into them allow scientists to observe the effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments on human cancer cells.
Improving Chemotherapy
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A major problem with chemotherapy is that the treatment damages more than cancer cells. Scientists have searched for ways of protecting individuals healthy cells from the negative effects of the treatment. According to an article on WebMD, a recent study of mice demonstrated that fasting before chemotherapy could reduce the toxic effects of the treatment. Mice who did not eat for two days before their chemotherapy treatments showed as much as a fivefold increase in stress resistance.
Finding Alternatives
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Mice are currently being used to test alternative cancer treatment including the use of carbon nanotubes, which can invade cancer cells without effecting normal cells. Mice have also been used in testing recombinant DNA technology and gene therapy including the use of retroviruses to attack defective genes and protect healthy ones. Early research with mice has shown gene therapy techniques to be extremely effective in causing tumors to regress and even disappear.
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References
- Photo Credit mouse image by timur1970 from Fotolia.com
