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by tomiles 6013 days ago
"If I had a nickel for every time someone claimed to cure cancer in mice, I'd be a rich man."

First thing that comes to mind when reading titles like this. Mice is a model for human biomedical research, but far from a perfect one, especially in the cancer field. There are substantial differences that make it hard to extrapolate these results in mice to humans.

As a medical biotechnology grad student I read these claims often and it's a shame that most of the time it's impossible to find a reference to the original article. Hard to know than if it's an exaggeration generating false hope or a genuinely promising cure with consequences for treatments in humans.

1 comments

I think that the 20th and the 21st centuries will go down in history as the best time to be a mouse on this planet.
This is both funny and sadly true -- if we tolerated as much failure in people as we did in mice who knows where medicine would be today.