A Mouse Made Just For You Will Model Your Medical Problems
Lab Mouse Wikimedia Commons When you check in to a hospital in the future, along with checking your vitals and ordering a blood panel, your doctors may assign you a personal mouse. The immune-deficient creature will receive a transplant of your tissue, which will allow it to mimic your immune system, or maybe your specific type of cancer. Then doctors can try out a cocktail of drugs or gene therapies to see what might work on you. 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, and if they make some mistakes, it's OK because it's a mouse, not a human patient. In one recent study, Australian researchers were working with a pancreatic cancer patient, trying to determine genetic mutations...