Nanosensors Could Help Reduce Laboratory Animal Testing 51
cylonlover writes "Animal testing is an area that elicits strong feelings on both sides of the argument for and against the practice. Supporters like the British Royal Society argue that virtually every medical breakthrough of the 20th century involved the use of animals in some way, while opponents say that it is not only cruel, but actually impedes medical progress by using misleading animal models. Whatever side of the argument researchers fall on, most would likely use an alternative to animal testing if it existed. And an alternative that reduces the need for animal testing is just what Fraunhofer researchers hope their new sensor nanoparticles will be."
Interesting development... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting development... (Score:5, Informative)
This is indeed the proof that animal testing is necessary. It is goddamn expensive. Nobody does it for fun, or out of sheer cruelty. It costs money, and would be avoided if possible, for simple economical reasons.
Stupid personal story: my wife once bought a cosmetic that touted not being tested on animals. She got a severe rash using it... She now buys the one that are indeed tested on animals instead of customers.
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Well they lied: it was tested on animals. Just happened to be that your wife was one of them :(
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Re:Interesting development... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's more true with some animals than others. Anything that uses primates is expensive as hell, but mice are cheap; laboratories go through literally millions of them per year (estimates are around 50 million/year for the U.S.), and spend less on them than on even the grad students.
Now a reusable sensor has the advantage that it can be cleaned and reused (depending on the design), so there may not need to be 50 million sensors to replace 50 million mice. But the per-unit cost they'll have to match to compete with the quite cheap/disposable mice is still a pretty daunting design/manufacturing challenge.
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A bit of poking around on the expensive side of the menu [jax.org] though, and you can end up paying north of $200/mouse, plus any additional costs for special requests.
Of course, since this sensor widget is designed to be used in tissue cultures, you'll end up paying extra for exotic genomes whether in goo form or in mouse form(on the other hand, the instruments/diagnostics/dissection/w
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I don't know if you would call $10,000 for a male and female mouse very cheap. Off course those are the variants that are genetically modified to develop a certain degenerative disease but they are still expensive - of course they breed so fast it's worth the investment. We are also housing a colony that can literally be scared to death.
Taking care of them also costs a lot of money as does the security measures to keep people like PETA out.
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how conscious and sentient is a rodent? probably a little conscious and not sentient at all.
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no, that is only the hypothesis of animal rights activists, and also some (unscientific) lawmakers. it is an assumption without proof
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And the rodents do look more attractive with makeup.
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Even when they test on animals, they still have to test on humans because we react differently to chemicals than animals.
Too true. But it's a lot like what Winston Churchill said about democracy: " No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." We absolutely suck at creating model systems in which to test drugs, but we're better than we used to be :)
Re:Interesting development... (Score:4, Insightful)
This might be a good way to reduce the number of animals needed in research, which is a laudable goal. But it won't be able to replace them entirely. In vitro research always has to be confirmed in vivo. Nothing about this technology changes that.
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A sensor doesn't need food, water or shelter.
or give you that much information. Animals get used because individual cells and tissues can't stand in for a whole organism when it comes to, well, pretty much everything. They just don't behave the same. Adding an ATP sensor (of which there are already many) won't really change that, especially when there are plenty of other, more fine grained ways to measure toxicity. This seems more like an overhyped but otherwise very cool tool for studying respiration.
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So, what am I going to do with all these rats? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, there goes my plan. Now I'm just a guy with a shitload of rats in his basement.
Re:So, what am I going to do with all these rats? (Score:4, Funny)
got any neighbors you don't like?
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Sell them to the DEA, they love rats.
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Bam, fixed that business model for ya.
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Well, there goes my plan. Now I'm just a guy with a shitload of rats^H^H^H^H snakes in his basement.
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1) Get shipping container
2) Get mailing address of SOPA supporting corporation
3) Do I really have to spell this out for you?
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4) The SOPA supporters whip out their lizard tongues, hang the rats over their gaping jaws, and slowly swallow them.
. . . you did know that the Visitors are behind SOPA, didn't you . . . ?
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Do any Gizmag editors understand science? (Score:5, Informative)
This idea is decades old -- testing substances in tissue culture. The Frauenhofer guys have come up with an interesting improvement.
It will never replace most of the animal testing.
Researchers do tissue culture testing all the time. Then after the tissue culture tests, they have to see if it still works in the rats. Lots of times it doesn't. That's especially true with cancer treatments. There are lots of pathways in real animals, and they interfere with each other, particularly liver enzymes.
We cured cancer in tissue culture many times. Then they try to repeat it in animals and it doesn't work.
And lots of animal testing has nothing to do with activating a receptor. How can you send a tissue culture through a maze?
This is especially a problem for discovering harmful effects of consumer products.
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When you stop and think about it, animal testing could never be replaced with any amount of science. Animals are very complex systems. No simple system will capture every interaction. And if you do create a system complex enough that it will react as an animal would to any given stimuli, you've basically built yourself an animal, and it's no more moral to run tests on it than it is to run tests on a mouse.
interesting. (Score:3)
Ban animal testing (Score:3)
They just get nervous and give the wrong answers anyway.
Slows down research (Score:2)
One cost of this "cheaper" system that no one has discussed yet, is it slows down research. Lets say it takes a week to do a nano sensor run, an a week to do a rodent run.
So old fashioned technique is 100 mice get 10 samples in one week for a rodent run
The new technique is 100 nanosensors get 10 samples in one week, result is 8 totally suck but 2 might either work or give mice cancer or something. Then 20 mice get 2 samples in week two, the rodent run. Now, yes, you've saved the life of 80 mice, but "one
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Some products can only be tested on animals since it is intended for their use. Microsoft Windows, for example, should never be tested with a sapient creature.
The title (Score:2)
Raise your hand if you read it as "Nonsense Could Help Reduce Laboratory Animal Testing" the first time.
Test more humans (Score:1)
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The chap who wants the compound tested almost always has substantially more data(from preliminary pre-human study) about safety than does the chap who will potentially be testing it. He does not have an incent
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Until we eliminate poverty, nothing is truly voluntary.
Old test with new buzzword (Score:2)
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Just a fancy dye for ATP (Score:2)
This is just an example of a membrane permeable dye for ATP detection. They are just looking at cells grown in cell culture media....
While this is cool, it is far from a replacement for animal models. For example, this would be useless to test the immune system response to a pathogen. It wouldn't let you determine how a bacterial pathogen enters its host and disseminates through the body. It wouldn't let you see what blood stream levels are produced for a given oral dose of a drug.
Animal research sucks... b
another ATP ratiometric dye, yahoo (Score:4, Informative)
A**holes! (Score:2)
>that virtually every medical breakthrough of the 20th century involved the use of animals in some way,
All those test results would still have been accomplished with human test subjects instead of animal ones....
I prefer using human test subjects , as no cruelty will come to them they way it does to animals in labs,
and the testing will not be needlessly done, where as I find many of the tests on animals are done quite carelessly sometimes
as they know they can just easily get more test subjects.
The differ