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Posted by United Press International on March 11, 2010, 12:24 pm
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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., March 11 (UPI) -- A Purdue University
scientist says adding environmental variables to laboratory mouse
testing would increase the accuracy of such experiments.
Assistant Professor Joseph Garner says the traditional
practice in animal testing has been standardization. But when he and
his colleagues compared results from multiple mice experiments set
up in a standardized manner against multiple experiments set up with
controlled variables they found substantially greater differences in
the traditionally formatted experiments.
The study showed adding as few as two controlled
environmental variables to pre-clinical mouse tests can greatly
reduce costly false positives, the number of animals needed for
testing and the cost of pharmaceutical trials.
Garner says the findings challenge the assumption in drug
discovery and related fields that animal experiments should
eliminate all variables. He said despite standardization efforts,
two experiments in different labs could never truly be exactly the
same because of uncontrollable variables such as the scent of the
researchers or background noises.
Garner said about 90 percent of drugs thought to be
effective in mice fail in human trials. Reducing the number of drugs
that won't be successful could eliminate hundreds of millions of
dollars per drug in some cases and reduce the cost of research and
development that is passed on to consumers.
The study is reported in the journal Nature Methods.
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