Development at the Technion: Animals will simulate human systems for experiments

Researchers at the Faculty of Medicine, the Rappaport Research Institute at the Technion and the Rambam Medical Center have developed a system for conducting "humane" experiments on laboratory animals

The researchers of the Faculty of Medicine at the Technion and the Rambam Medical Center succeeded in developing a system that allows "humane" experiments to be performed on laboratory animals. This is reported by the scientific journal Cancer Research.

The researchers, Professor Karl Skortsky, director of the Rapaport Institute at the Technion Faculty of Medicine, who came up with the idea for the project, and Dr. Mati Zuckerman, who leads the project in the Molecular Medicine Laboratory, developed the system in view of the failures recorded in clinical trials on humans, even though the drugs achieved good results in animal trials.

"To test a new drug, it must be tried in a human system," explains Dr. Zuckerman. "Since there is a great danger in immediately testing it in humans, the drug is first tested in laboratory animals. Only if the drug has been successfully tested in animals, it is approved for human trials. Then - either it is very successful in humans as well, or it fails, or it has side effects that do not allow its continued use by patients. In recent years, a number of studies have been published that have raised questions about the effectiveness of animal experiments, and have wondered if the structural similarity between the various systems of the mouse and the human - also means similarity and identity at the functional level."

The researchers made use of the fact that human embryonic stem cells, injected into a mouse, differentiate and form a mass called a teratoma, which consists of a mixture of tissues of human origin, such as cartilage, blood vessels, adipose tissue or connective tissue - which constitute an environment of human tissue in the mouse.

The innovation in the original development of the Technion researchers is the possibility to simulate the development of a cancerous tumor in a mouse, as if it were developing in a human. The blood supply to the tumor is also done by blood vessels of human origin in addition to the mouse blood vessels. This is how the experiment is actually carried out in the mouse, but the support for its development is the same as in human tissue and the results of the experiment are more reliable.

The innovative development has additional advantages: since the teratoma that is formed in the mouse is a mixture of many human tissues, the cancerous tumor receives support that comes from a wide variety of tissues, so the results of the experiment can express tumors of different types, and it is possible to test how different drugs affect the tumor. Another advantage - possible side effects of the drug on normal tissues in the body can also be checked in this way.

The new development, which the Technion has patented, can improve the reliability of experiments on animals in various aspects - both in terms of the drug's effectiveness in eliminating cancer, and in terms of the dose that must be given to the patient, since its side effects can also be tested in the experiment.