Mice guide human drug trial

摘要

The mouse hospital at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, boasts resources rivalling those offered to human patients, including state-of-the-art medical-imaging facilities, round-the-clock nursing staff and access to cutting-edge cancer drugs. The goal is not to cure mice, of course, but to gain insight into clinical trials of those drugs in humans. The roughly 5,000 rodent residents at Dana-Farber are pioneers in an approach known as a co-clinical trial, in which a human clinical trial is partnered with animal studies designed to reveal clues about why some patients respond to a treatment and others fail to do so.