It's a waste of time. There isn't a model that can sufficiently simulate the chaotic behavior of biological cellular systems and the complex interactions with potential chemical treatments. Models are Mickey mouse representations of reality.

It's not completely a waste of time. Animal research is extremely expensive in terms of time, man hours and money[1]. Whatever shortcut you can take to detect ineffective treatments before reaching this stage is arguably going to cost you more time and money than raising a colony of rats for testing your hypothesis out.

[1]: I own 4 (once 5) pet rats. They are only a small colony and, while I love them, I don't keep them at lab standards (for example, I don't a vet sleeping on the couch 24/7 in case of emergencies), yet, in a bad month, I could end up with spending 1000+$ for their health. Now, imagine that for the health standard of lab rats/mice and the numbers required for research.

There are companies who make money by wasting time like that. I'm no expert in this field but from what I gather sometimes Mickey Mouse Models can help too. Economics is built on such models.

The GDP of an economy can be described in 5 variables. The non-linear dynamic processes like what occurs at the cellular level and at the organism level in a biological system, cannot be modeled with any degree of certainty. The complex chemical interactions of medicines with complex organisms like mice cannot be modeled with any degree of certainty, neither in the short term nor the long term. Uncertainty is an exponential function of time in such systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

You can't exactly predict next year's gdp with 5 variables. Retrospective analysis while accepting certain variation of error is another thing.

domain bias much?