Posted by bookofjoe 18 hours ago
Also, the other definition in question is what the UCLA PR person means by "repairing brain damage". As far as I can tell from the paper - the "drug" part was using some neurotransmitter blockers on brain cells on a Petri dish to see if they could change gene expression or oscillatory firing patterns matching recordings in mice undergoing "physical therapy". They did not actually test to see if the stuff grew new brain cells or dendritic connections.
Does that mean it will neccesarily work? No, of course not. But its still exciting to see progress being made.
Mice are used only partly because they share a considerable amount of DNA with us. But they're mostly used because they're cheap. Both in financial and ethical costs.
They live for about two years, and breed in about three months. They are disposable. Over 100 million are killed each year in various labs across the country.
And for all of this, only about 5% of medicine that show positive animal results make it to market in some fashion. So basically, the best thing we can say about a mouse-tested drug is that "this most likely won't make things worse". But that's like a low bar.
In reality, if you have 100 5% chances of a cure for a previously incurable illness, you can celebrate each chance a lot.
These numbers are obviously entirely made up, but its worth noting that 100 5% chances of a cure, means you have at least 1 cure with (1-(.95)^100) = 99.4% probability.
If you are curing an incurable disease with 99.4% probability, celebrating a lot would be an understatement.
I'm surprised its that high tbh. And i suspect it would be a similar low number if we tested on humans instead of animals.
And yes, being able to test early stage ideas cheaply is critical to innovating. We use mice in biology for the same reason we use computer simulations in other fields.
Anyways, if we took your numbers of 5% chance at face value, that means there is a 1 in 20 chance of this press release turning into a real drug that saves real people's lives. Personally i dont think the chance is actually that high, but if it was that would only further my point that this is a milestone worth celebrating.
This is ignoring at least these benefits: surgery, development, genetic studies, grafts, anesthesia, and many MANY more. Some non-drug related, some drug adjacent, and they definitely have downstream benefits to humans.
Here's a survey paper with myriad examples: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9247923/
I really don't like when bioscience articles land here in HN because they are always commented on with:"in mice", as if to say nothing we see from mouse work works. Well, not everything is software and this kind of work takes years, if not decades. It is real science unfortunately which means that most of it doesn't work! Science, and bioscience specifically, are not efficient systems. In general, the things you do are hard and probably won't work. That doesn't mean you give up.
Animal models are not great, but they are the best progression we can do right now from cell models. And as for being disposable, there are controls on how animals are used in labs in the US: every institution that has animal experimentation has an IACUC (institutional animal care and use committee) that every research proposal must go through, and they do not a rubber stamp your proposal. They want to know why you can't use cell models, and why you can't do it with less or even no animals.
It would be nice if people were a bit more even handed when these types of articles come by. I think HN can do better.
An adage from the lab: "If what we did always worked it would be business, not science."
Let’s just skip straight to human trials.
I haven’t used psilocybin in a clinical setting but have gone through an alternative psychedelic-assisted therapy process. Very interesting results and many positives.
I've not tried that stuff since money is hard to come by these days. There have been a few human studies.
You can find more info here:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=bacopa+monnieri+cognit...
and here:
You perceive the idea as great not because you suddenly understand it better or know more. You think the idea is great because of the dopamine flooding your brain. And much like Dunning-Kruger, even thought you might think you did better, real world results don’t match your expectations.