Over the last 25 years or so, there have been at least a dozen announcements of the latest miracle cure that works to repair spinal cord injury in mice. To date, none of them have translated to human efficacy. It's almost a meme at this point - like net-positive fusion being only ten years away. There appears to be a fundamental difference between mice and human nervous system injury repair modes that leads to early confidence. The spinal cords in mice essentially repair themselves if you so much as ask nicely.
The real litmus test for claims of effective spinal cord repair treatments is primate testing. If you see mice and not chimps, the treatment is probably a dead end.
Not to say this research doesn't have value - I fully support continued and rigorous research in this area - but hyperbolic claims like: "it works in mice, so it should also work in humans" aren't helping the cause.
"We are going straight to the FDA to start the process of getting this new therapy approved for use in human patients, who currently have very few treatment options.”
This is not a cheap process in terms of money and manpower. I think they probably have reason for confidence.
IIRC, the motor CNS in mammals is pretty similar across the board.
I thought the main point of mouse models was mostly to be a "first pass filter" for substances before moving onto other animals usually, sometimes humans if the straits are desperate enough. Cancer drugs in particular have little concern for long term side effects in their approval pipeline because the alternative may be having no long term.
First pass filters mean nothing when it comes to humans. 95% of all "stuff that works on mice" fails miserably on humans. We should treat such announcements with extreme skepticism.
I would guess things like how nerves and bones work is more similar across species than, say, how drugs might work on the brain, where a mouse brain is a hell of a lot different to human. Is that a reasonable assumption?
I was wondering the same thing. Pluses and minuses...
Rodents represent readily available models that can be used for a deeper understanding of basic biological mechanisms and for proof of concept for preclinical research hypotheses. However, attempts at direct clinical translation to humans have proven problematic or even impossible to date, principally due to issues of scaling and complexity.
I'm not an expert, but I guess this part is similar enough in mice and human to be optimistic. But IIUC the treatment only makes the regrow of the cut axons faster, it does not reconnect one part with the other part. So the time you should wait until the axon grows to the initial length in humans will be much longer than in mice.
"yet another headline that assumes that mice models have any bearing on humans". It's actually the other way around, very rarely do mice models results replicate in humans.
...as if some sort of future rodent time travelers went back in earth's pre-history and tasked countless human-filled labs with unlocking the secrets of rodent medical science so they could, in their own time, mine the wisdom of the ancients and ensure their immortality.
The real litmus test for claims of effective spinal cord repair treatments is primate testing. If you see mice and not chimps, the treatment is probably a dead end.
Not to say this research doesn't have value - I fully support continued and rigorous research in this area - but hyperbolic claims like: "it works in mice, so it should also work in humans" aren't helping the cause.