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Ami992 t1_iw41tvj wrote

Reply to comment by userbrn1 in How do medical researchers obtain lab animals with diseases like specific forms of cancer which arise spontaneously? Do they raise thousands of apes and hope some eventually develop the disease? by userbrn1

I breed mouse without a Gene called ATM (a very important tumor suppressor gene) the usually develop cancer's at the age of 3-4 months.

I can also breed mice with only one allele of the ATM gene also known as heterozygous mouse, they develop cancer at 1-1.5 years

If time of onset is of concern to me i can raise regular healthy mice with the ATM gene on a cre lox system, so when i give the mice water containing TAMOXIPEN (a drug) the ATM gene will turn off and the mouse will quickly develop tumor's

I can see that you are interested in the oods and luck based approach, 40 years ago humanity did breed animals and observed random occurrences of deseases and studied them. today we are way past that, we have almost complete control of the mose genome and can create whatever desease modle we want - no luck involved.

The problem with developing cures is not creating a sick mouse, when we find a cure that works on a mouse 90% of the time it would not be affective on humans and that's is what holding science back nowadays

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