Due to the way medication is developed, we basically only end up with medicine that works on humans + at least one other species.

I wonder how many medications we have missed out on that would have worked on humans but never got to the human trial stage because it doesn’t work in any of the animal models we use.

And a condition we can induce in another animal. If we can't cause it in another animal then we can't test a drug against it. There are a lot of diseases that can make no progress under this model which we can not induce in animals or humans.

Fascinating! Reminds me how machine learning as a field is often focused on tasks that can be quantitatively evaluated using large datasets. There are a lot of tasks that do not fit this model, especially interactive tasks.

This isn’t a medication it’s a mechanism study.

I would expect not many and certainly far less than the number of medications that worked in animals but did not work or harmed humans.

Aspirin is famous for having teratogenic effects on rabbits and would never have been approved for humans if it were to be tested nowadays

Why? Plenty of teratogenic drugs are approved and in routine use in non-pregnant patients.

Any recent example?

Not really sure what you're getting at, teratogenicity only matters if a person is pregnant and lack of teratogenicity is in no way a requirement for FDA approval.

There are many commonly used drugs with teratogenic risks that we discontinue in pregnancy or counsel the patient on, picking randomly from a list of medications that were approved in 2023: sparsentan

I'm not sure if I'm missing something but why are you thinking teratogenicity matters when the vast majority of patients are not pregnant at a given moment?

> Bayer said that aging in mice and humans both decrease a process known as S-nitrosylation, the modification of a specific brain proteins including CaMKII

While this is true, the same protein, even the same gene, often serve different purposes in different species. So even if we figure a problem out in mice down to the gene level it might not yield any results in humans. That's also the reason why the majority of drugs that have a positive outcome when trialed on mice don't yield positive results in human trials.

Is there any mechanism for a potential medication that has not been discovered first in mice?

People just jump to say this like it's a game now. The headline says 'may have found the mechanism'. It's not claiming anything that needs this

so "scientists baffled and confused" would have been more accurate :)

edit: I'm overthinking this, but the word "scientists" does a lot of heavy lifting in the headline. The number of things the human race in general and scientists especially are unsure about is vast. Putting a person in a white overcoat, spectacles, and pen in their pockets to lead the sentence with authority doesn't give them a chance of not looking dumb. Scientists in media language are 100% of the time more clownish than even politicians or any other profession.

Even the content in itself is garbage, in which case the headline does justice, or there was in fact something news-worthy but the meta-analysis by this article has missed it.

Maybe if mice did Math, they could avoid this cognitive decline people talk about..

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1059235/great-contr...

I misread your comment as "meth" the first time and I was like... well I guess that could theoretically help. You know, aside from the neurotoxicity of meth.

I take dextroamphetamine for ADHD, and even though it's a lot less toxic than meth is, I still have to take frequent magnesium supplements or else my magnesium levels totally dive (confirmed by blood tests).

I saw this report the other day and didn't submit it here because of "...in mice". I mean I agree with your comment btw.

We probably need a standard bracket suffix like (in mice) for these sorts of things, as we do for year.

> ...in mice.

Should be by default attached to any medical news headline, just to be correct more often than not.