Are We Men or Are We…?
In what could be the ultimate in personalized medicine, animals bearing your disease, or part of your anatomy, can serve as your personal guinea pig, so to speak. Some researchers call them avatars, like the virtual characters in movies and online games.
“The mice allow you the opportunity to test drugs to find out which ones will be efficacious without exposing the patient to toxicity,” said Colin Collins, a professor at the University of British Columbia.
“I had 10 tumors on my right kidney,” said Mr. Toib. “All of them disappeared.”
While Mr. Toib joked that he had himself “cloned” in the mice, neither he nor most other patients feel any personal attachment to their mice.
More on personalized care in the New York Times.
I think Neil deGrasse Tyson sums it up best:
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/i-cant-hear-you-over-the-sound-of-how-awesome-science-is.jpeg
Poor mices…
“Experts caution that it has not been proved that the use of avatars will prolong the lives of cancer patients. And it costs tens of thousands of dollars, which insurers will not cover, to create and test a colony of the animals.”
This sounds very promising, but it’s not here yet.
The mice are euthanized if they are suffering too much.
Are those death panels regulated by the ACA, or are those decisions more of a monetary thing?
I just recently saw another post on a similar issue…but instead of using mices, they were using dogs. What’s next?
I wonder if the body parts that are grown on the mice can be genetically coded to be stronger than previous tissue.
That’s just so cool!
amazing.
I covered the literature about pigworms on Crohn’s patients and how they actually improved on my blog which gives this hygiene hypothesis some credit.
http://crohnszone.blogspot.com/2012/09/pig-whipworm-treatment-for-crohns-and.html