A Mouse Made Just for You!

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-03/personal-mouse-avatars-will-model-your-medical-problems

In the future when you check into a hospital, doctors and physicians may assign you your own mouse. This isn’t for a pet- this is for your own diagnosis. The immune-deficient mouse, specially bred for this job, will receive a transplant of your tissue, which will allow it to mimic your immune system, or whatever your specified type of disease afflicting you. Then doctors can try out a cocktail of drugs or gene therapies to see what might work on you, using the mouse as a test first.

Two teams of researchers have been working on personalized mouse models, or mouse avatars, that can serve as test beds for doctors looking for the right treatments. Physicians could try different combinations of drugs to see what works best without the consequences of human trial and error and losing human lives. Doctors at Columbia University have created mice with human immune systems, which they are using to study autoimmune diseases.  “The work took several weeks, but in the end, the mouse had a complete human immune system, including T cells, beta cells and myeloid cells, which create other immune cells. Sykes plans to use this personalized immune mouse to study type 1 diabetes, which is caused by errant T cells attacking insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. That paper was published last week in Science Translational Medicine.”

“In one recent study, Australian researchers were working with a pancreatic cancer patient, trying to determine genetic mutations that could make his cancer susceptible to certain drugs. They grafted a piece of the patient’s tumor tissue onto mice with depleted immune systems, so the mice would not reject the transplant. They tested a cancer drug that their gene screening suggested could work, and they were right — the tumor shrank after the mice were treated.” This is a great breakthrough that presents very hopeful treatment prospects in the future for cancer patients especially, but also patients afflicted with other illnesses.

Since growing a personalized mouse is tricky and expensive, scientists are working to make it more affordable, commonplace, and more mass-produced so that hopefully in the near future, maybe as soon as 15 or 20 years, we will be able to have this personalized treatment available to nearly all patients. Research likes this shows a very promising outlook for the medical and diagnostic field. Do you guys think this is a great advancement? Do you think it work should be continued? How do you think that it will help future patients?