[cyberax]

> This is why mice and rodents are used to test initial viability before then moving on to theraputics development.

They are used because they're the _only_ way to test drugs early in development. Animal cruelty laws make it nearly impossible to use non-murine species for initial drug tests.

Additionally, mice are easy to breed and to keep, and there's a great variety of specialized genetic lines.

[alephnerd]

Absolutely, yet the underlying similarity between our genomes makes it good enough for most cases, plus the Rodent genome has been sequenced and tested for decades now.

Idk why you are trying to die on this hill. I've provided decently authoritative sources (The Jackson Institute, Cambridge University, and the NIH)

Unless you have a PhD in Systems Biology or Genomics, I'm going to trust them over you.

Edit: an actual OG in the field of genomics just commented - listen/chat with him, not me.

[cyberax]

For most cases, yes. Antibiotics discovery? Sure, mice are awesome.

But mice make really bad models for anything to do with brain, aging, inflammation, and cancer. That's why comments "in mice" are appropriate in these areas.

And it's not at all controversial, here are my citations:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1222878110 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6615039/

Mice studies are not useless, for sure. But they're almost always are not directly translatable to humans.

[signatoremo]

As a layman, why should I trust your citation over studies that highlight the advantages of using mice in aging research? - [0]

> But mice make really bad models for anything to do with brain, aging, inflammation, and cancer

If mice is really bad for research in the fields you mentioned, why do scientists around the world continue to use it? Wouldn’t they know it’s a dead end?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074346/#:~:tex....