Nanotechnology and the nerve cell or Who said animal testing was useless again? - by SubJeff
SubJeff on 17/3/2006 at 08:29
StD's degree is in Evironmental or Ecological Biology or something I think. And afaik drug testing isn't on the sylabus. And if it was it was taught badly.
Animal testing (now, since Thalidomide) has to be done on at least one rodent and one non-rodent species iirc. Of course it is recognised that some things will fail the animal tests and be safe for humans. But as this is all a risk-benefit excercise and the intention is to be safe and not go "meh, we might as well try it" this is just the way it is. No-one says it is perfect, just like no treatment for any disease is perfect. But then dumbos like StD just cannot understand that. You can harp on about it in your foolish way but unless you are prepared to step up to the plate and be an experimental subject pre-Phase 1 you should just shut up.
SD on 17/3/2006 at 08:58
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
But then dumbos like StD just cannot understand that.
Know what, there are dozens of highly respected scientists who believe animal testing is of questionable or limited benefit. All dumbos, right?
SD on 17/3/2006 at 16:16
There's an (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4817178.stm) interesting article on the BBC's website today about animal testing. Some dumbo, a so-called expert by the name of Dr David Glover, suggests we might be better off looking at innovative new ways of testing drugs on humans, rather than relying on animal tests.
Quote:
One possible way of testing drugs which were specifically focused on human biological targets was a technique called micro-testing.
This involves creating a blister on a person's arm - which contains cells that a microscopic amount of a drug could be tested on.
"This would mean you could look at the effect on cells before trying it on a whole person."
dvrabel on 17/3/2006 at 17:57
Strontium Dog, did you stop reading once you found a quote that supported your view?
"Another way, he suggested, would be to manipulate the immune system of mice so they contained human immune cells - in order to give a better picture of what might happen when the drug was given to humans."
Vigil on 17/3/2006 at 18:12
It's almost as if animal testing wasn't the issue!
WAREAGLE on 18/3/2006 at 15:58
Really....
What is so wrong with animal testing? If it is for human benifit I see nothing wrong. They're just animals.
TenTailedCat on 18/3/2006 at 15:59
Can I jump in with a question on the issue of these six guys -
A science person I sort of know told me that the issue with these guys might be that the drug they were testing was found to be able to fight a specific type of cell population present within B-cell Chronic Lymphoid Leukaemia. This drug (called TGN1412) is able to stimulate the T-cells to responsed against them, they often go ignored by the immune system
The problem is (might be) that this cell population may not be present in healthy people, so in effect the immune system was triggered to fight against something that wasn't there and promptly went apeshit. Which is what presumably fucked them up so badly.
My question (after all that) is - why are phase I clinical trials performed on healthy induviduals in the first place?
PS - I'm not a science doin' guy, so I probably got some of that^ wrong.
Vigil on 18/3/2006 at 16:19
Because for most treatments, healthy people are more likely to survive any unknown side-effects of the medication; whereas sick people have weakened immune systems and fewer resources to resist those effects, and so are more likely to die if the medication turns out to be harmful. The next phase, once the medicine is determined to by harmless to healthy people, is to start trialing on sufferers.
There's probably clear exceptions to this, such as where the treatment is intended to correct particular deficiencies that a healthy person would not have and for which an overabundance would be harmful, such as insulin. But if what your scientist friend said is true, then that's not really the case here and they couldn't have foreseen this dramatic a reaction from the immune system. In any case I think the last thing they would do is test their first trials on leukaemia victims themselves, given how frail they are.
TenTailedCat on 18/3/2006 at 16:27
I figures that was probably the case, thanks for clearing it up.
You mention exceptions to the general practice of using healthy sbjects - I read (Wikipedia lol reliable source) that patients with advanced Cancer and those with HIV who cannot undergo other treatments sometimes take part in Phase I trials.
I'm presuming this is because they don't have much hope for survival anyway.
