- Think of a world where more new medicines are available more quickly, more safely and with few, if any, animals used in research. Think of a world where you know for sure that the drug you are prescribed is safe for you. This is what researchers at some of the world's leading universities are trying to bring about.
mk and b_b, do you see more computer modeling in your research taking the place of such methods?
I ain't either of those two, but I've had a fair bit of exposure to the topic at hand, so I'm gonna weigh in with a "Nope" If you're talking about physical accuracy of the models, the most cutting edge research out there is WholeCell, which has gotten M. genitalium, to within somewhat reasonable tolerances. They're still working their way up to E. coli, the most popular single-celled prokaryote out there. Which is a completely separate domain from eukaryotes, which includes things like: 1) Having a nucleus, 2) splicing RNA, 3) chromatin, and more pathways than you can remember after a decade of training, and where more are being discovered every day. If you're talking small, "Does A bind B", docking algorithms have existed for more than two decades now, and though they're getting better, they're nowhere near close to drugging any target you desire from your local cafe. But that's fine. They don't have to incorporate every part of your model to still be useful. Having an idea about how your drug moves through tissue can still guide your early toxicity experiments. They can still narrow the chemical search space and sometimes let you build up a compound by a semi-rational process. They can still warn you if your drug looks similar to another one that failed in a clinic, 5,000 miles away. But models primarily exist to guide scientists, as another tool, not replace them. Until they figure out how to solve the quantum wave function for a 150lb adult, the animal is still going to exist as a reasonable safeguard against a human dropping dead after you gave them the first pill because it turned out to bind an obscure receptor in the lung that was only expressed under a particular stress. But if you have a better prediction of which compounds will make it through clinical trials, that's still less animal trials per disease cured. A plus, but the 9-in-10 failure rate and billion dollars per drug are also pretty strong motivators for the same tools, too. Most of what I've said holds true of tissue cultures, labs on chips, synthetic organoids, and pretty much every other drug-dev tech under the sun. They've valuable, but not sufficient to replace real biology. -- George Box P.S. Completely left out of the discussion is the use of animals in basic biology research, the author didn't even bother to research the number for the split between those and biomedical research.All models are wrong, but some are useful