Cancer patients turning to mice for hopes of a cure
In lab some carry bits of their tumours so treatments can be tried first on the customised rodents
Scientists often test drugs in mice. Now some cancer patients are doing the same – with the hope of curing their own disease.
They are paying a private lab to breed mice that carry bits of their own tumours so treatments can be tried first on the customised rodents. The idea is to see which drugs might work best on an individual’s specific cancer.
The mice may help patients make what can be very hard choices under difficult circumstances. Studies can suggest a certain chemotherapy may help, but patients wonder whether it will work for them. Often there’s more than one choice, and if the first one fails, a patient may be too sick to try another. So hundreds of people have made “mouse avatars” over the last few years to test chemotherapies.
“What I’m doing is personalised cancer treatment. It’s the wave of the future,” said Eileen Youtie, a Miami woman using mice to guide care for her hard-to-treat form of breast cancer. “Part of this is trying to eliminate chemos that are not going to work on me. I don’t want to waste time taking them and poison my body,” she said.
But there are no guarantees the mice will help.
“There’s not a lot of science” to say how well this works, and it should be considered highly experimental, said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.
