Faulty Use of Animal Models Delays Drug Development

Before drugs are tested on people, they're tested on animals. It's far from a perfect arrangement: if every pill capable of treating diseases in mice or monkeys worked for people, we'd be living in a golden age of human health.

A certain amount of indeterminacy is acceptable. After all, the only fully human animals are human. But as The Scientist points out, the gap between lab animals and people is widened by the lack of standards -- if not the outright sloppiness -- guiding clinical trials for animals.

The statistical troubles that mired some of the [once-promising
Parkinson's drug] NXY-059 preclinical trials are common in animal models. Surveys of papers based on animal models find errors in about half, according to Michael Festing, a recently retired laboratory animal scientist [...]

In an initial pilot study of 12 papers conducted in 2001 for the
Medical Research Council, Festing reported: In six of the papers the number of animals used wasn't clear; only two of the papers reported randomization; and only six of the papers specified the sex of the animals tested. [...]

Statistics aren't the only problem. Methodology is arbitrary, replication is lacking, and negative results are often omitted.

If you have a few minutes, read the entirety of this article.
It's easy for people -- and particularly science journalists -- to get carried away with promising animal results. I've made it a point here at Wired Science to mention only those animal studies that sound exceptionally promising, or reveal something about a drug or technique that wasn't previously known.

And on a related note, one way to improve rodent studies would be to use, rather than one or two homogeneous strains, a genetically variable collection of mice. I recently wrote an article on the Jackson
Laboratory's plan to do just that.

The Trouble With Animal Models [The Scientist]

Image: National Human Genome Research Institute*