Technology Is On Our Side

[jimcaster]

I am often frustrated by how often treatments seem to work in mice with drug induced "Parkinsons Disease" but not in a humans who actually have the disease. This could be a game changer.

parkinsonsnewstoday.com/202...

[park_bear]

There are occasional exceptions, but the usual mouse study checks whether some substance protects a mouse against MPTP -induced parkinsonism. Whereas, in the actual case we want to know whether a substance helps someone with actual Parkinson's recover. These are two quite different things.

Agree this new organ system would be an improvement. There is also a genetically modified mouse that gets actual Parkinson's and has been used in some studies.

[lenamm]

My guess is full PD is not being induced in mice. Would be interesting to see if their PTT are over firing.

[Rhyothemis]

What nags at me is the idea that maybe there is some treatment that works in humans that has been disregarded because it did not work in a mouse model.

I was wondering if human organoids can be implanted in mice - since having a whole body system is different (there's circulating immune mediators and such to consider) - and apparently they can: statnews.com/2018/04/16/hum...

The organoids can be derived from patients and so it might be possible to screen therapies on organoids to see what would work for a specific individual. A drawback would be if their disease is the result of a somatic mutation, in which case the organoid would not recapitulate it.

Another thing I have wondered about is why there isn't some general humanized brain mouse that serves as the basis for further engineering to model specific disease states. For example, cereblon is functionally different in mice vs. humans and it would seem better to have all mouse models of neurodegeneration express the human version of cereblon. However it's possible such mods may cause the mice to live longer and so reduce their utility.

[nsofka]

Here is a great story on how they’re growing mini brains to test out therapies for Parkinson’s:

parkinsonsnewstoday.com/202...

[nsofka in reply to nsofka]

Oh never mind I see you’ve already read it it’s great news!