Tag: Mice

Animal Aid and Others Call for Boycott of Botox

Animal rights groups in the UK recently discovered that every batch of Botox — the anti-wrinkle treatment that uses the botulinum toxin — is tested on mice to ensure its safety. UK animal rights group Animal Aid is calling for a boycott of Botox until the manufacturer switches to non-animal testing.

According to Animal Aid,

Thousands of mice are being poisoned to death to test the latest cosmetic craze: ‘Botox’. In barbaric experiments known as LD50 toxicity tests – supposedly outlawed by the government in 1999 – the animals are injected with the toxin and suffer symptoms including impaired vision, paralysis of the body, and paralysis of the diaphragm, which leads to death by suffocation.

Botulinum toxin, of course, is fatal to human beings so ensuring that human beings are only injected with enough to paralyze muscles rather than cause more serious problems is essential for ensuring the treatment’s safety.

Companies that manufacture botox assure this safety by using an LD50 test. Since botox batches will vary in potency, an LD50 test is used to determine what the correct dosage level for each batch is. In fact, botox is packaged in vials of 100 mouse units, with each mouse unit being the dosage need to kill 50 percent of mice when injected in animals.

Animal Aid believes such testing should be illegal under Great Britain’s ban on animal testing for cosmetics. But botox has a number of clinical uses as well, and what Great Britain has done is given manufacturer Dysport a blanket clearance to do animal testing of botox — since the use of botox for cosmetics purposes is still off-label in the UK, it hasn’t been forced to consider the conflict created with its cosmetics testing ban.

Sources:

Outcry over mice that die for every batch of Botox. Sean Poulter, Daily Mail (London), January 27, 2004.

Botox and Animal Experiments. Animal Aid, January 2004.

Researchers Restore Myelin in Mice

In a research published in Nature Medicine, researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center report they were able to restore damaged myelin in the brains of mice — a finding that could one day lead to better treatments for a wide variety of diseases and health conditions.

Myelin is a layer of proteins sandwiched between lipids and coats nerves, allowing signals to travel between the brain and the rest of the body. There are a number of diseases, like multiple sclerosis, in which myelin breaks down cause signals between the brain and body to degrade, impairing normal body functioning.

Myelin is produced by cells called oligodendrocytes. Researchers in this case injected purified forms of human brain cells that eventually turn into oligodendrocytes into the brains of the mice. The cells spread throughout the brains of the animals, developing into oligodendrocytes and then producing myelin.

In a prepared statement announcing the result, lead researcher Steven Goldman said,

The results are much better than expected. The percentage of cells in this experiment that began producing myelin is extraordinary, probably thousands of times as many as in previous experiments. . . . The implantation of oligodendrocyte progenitors could someday be a treatment strategy for these diseases [such as multiple sclerosis].

Previous works on restoring myelin managed to remyelinate small portions of the brains of mice, but this is the first effort that resulted in extensive remyelination in mice.

Source:

Scientists restore crucial myelin in brains of mice. Press Release, University of Rochester Medical Center, January 13, 2004.

Leukemia Vaccine Effective in Mice

In October, researchers reported in the journal Nature Medicine of their successful tests of a DNA vaccine in mice. In January, further evidence from a trial of the vaccine demonstrated that it could protect at least some of the mice for very long periods of time.

The research focused on acute promyeloctyic leukemia which is currently treated with chemotherapy which cures about 75 percent of cases.

The researchers used a mice model of the disease, exposing one experimental group to the vaccine and another experimental group to the vaccine and chemotherapy. In half the mice receiving the combination of the vaccine and chemotherapy, half the mice lived an additional 300 days — the equivalent of 25 human years.

The vaccine uses fragments of a faulty gene found in cancer cells to train the immune system of the animals to recognize and destroy cancerous cells.

As lead researcher Dr. Rose Padua told the BBC, this sort of approach might one day help improve survival odds for those patients who don’t respond to chemotherapy alone,

Currently, despite a major improvement in the survival of APL patients, a cure is still not achieved in all patients. The DNA based vaccine has proven to induce protective immunity. This example of a target therapy in an APL animal model may provide us with an alternative therapy, which if translated to humans, will improve quality of life and survival rates for leukemia patients.

Obviously, any human application would still be many years away.

Source:

Hope for leukemia vaccine. The BBC, January 7, 2004.

DNA drug offers leukaemia hope. The BBC, October 20, 2003.

Animal Research Moves Multi-Strain Meningitis Vaccine Efforts Forward

Researchers at the University of Surrey recently announced they had created a strain of meningitis B that cannot cause the often-deadly symptoms of the disease and thus could eventually lead to the development of a vaccine against the disease.

Currently, there are viable vaccines for both A and C strains of meningitis but not the B strain. Moreover meningitis is a major problem in developing countries because vaccines for the separate A and C strains of the disease are relatively expensive.

The new finding could kill both problems at once — after injecting mice with the strain of meningitis B, they found that the immune system of the animals created antibodies for all three major strains of the disease. A single vaccine that could provide immunity to all three strains would be a major development in efforts to reduce meningitis cases around the world.

The researchers who announced this discovery emphasized that their genetically engineered strain of meningitis B is not a vaccine yet. Dr. Johnjoe McFadden, lead researcher on the project, told BBC News Online,

At the moment, it isn’t a vaccine. What we need to do is identify the proteins in this strain that cause this cross reaction. We hope we will be able to complete this work within three years. However, we need additional funding if we are to press ahead with this work. At the moment, we don’t have funding to take this research forward.

This advance was made possible thanks to the sequencing of N. meningitidis in 2000.

Sources:

Improved meningitis vaccine ready ‘within a decade’. The Guardian, Stewart Maclean, January 5, 2004

Hope For New Meningitis Vaccine. Medica.De, January 5, 2004.

Vaccine ‘could beat meningitis’. The BBC, January 6, 2004.

Embryonic Stem Cells Cure Parkinson's-Like Disease in Mice

In September, U.S. researchers reported in Nature Biotechnology that they had used stem cells to cure mice who were bred to suffer from a Parkinson’s-like condition.

Researchers at the Stem Cell and Tumor Biology Laboratory took cells from the tails of the mice and used that to clone embryos. Stem cells from the embryos were then taken and altered to grow into a type of brain cell that the mice were missing. That tissue was then implanted into the brains of the mice.

The researchers reported that the Parkinson’s-like conditions in the mice disappeared after the tissue implant.

Dr. Lorzen Studer, lead research on the study, told the BBC that this research provided a proof of concept that embryonic stem cells could be used in this way, but that there are still many hurdles to overcome before this could be tested on human beings (not the least of which, in this case, would be the creation and use of embryonic stem cells which is still the subject of much ethical hand wringing).

Studer added that,

We don’t know if we would be able to do the same thing in humans — there is some research, which is controversial — that suggests that it might actually be impossible.

A similar study in 2002 also produced positive results when stem cells from mouse embryos were altered to produce brain tissue and then implanted into rats. That study, conducted at the University of Minnesota, showed that the transplanted stem cells grew into neurons in the brains of the rat and improved — though didn’t completely erase — the Parkinson’s-like symptoms suffered by the rats.

Source:

Mouse cloned to cure Parkinson’s. The BBC, September 21, 2003.

Embryonic Mouse Stem Cells Reduce Symptoms in Model for Parkinson’s Disease. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, June 25, 2003.

Researchers Develop Method to Produce Antibodies Quickly in Mice

In the September 2003 issue of Nature Biotechnology University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas describe a new procedure they’ve developed to speed up the production of antibodies in mice as well as producing higher quality antibodies.

Center director Stephen Johnston led a team of researchers in the 1990s that first demonstrated genetic immunization, and this new research builds on the earlier discovery.

Traditionally, animals such as mice will produce antibodies after being exposed to a specific protein. So-called genetic immunization achieves the same results by injecting the gene for the protein into the animal (in this case, mice).

The newly announced technique uses the antigen gene the researchers want to target, as well as modifying a gene that controls an immune system signaling compound.

The upshot is that not only do the mice pump put the desired antibody quickly, but almost any antibody can be produced this way. In a press release, Johnston said,

A surprising result [of the research] was that we could even make mice make antibodies to their own proteins. We think this system could be used to make antibodies to all the proteins in the genome. We hope these antibodies will contribute to discoveries that drive new advances in disease treatment.

Sources:

Mice become high-output antibody factories. Reuters, August 11, 2003.

Faster method for creating antibodies in mice discovered by UT Southwestern researchers. Press Release, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, August 11, 2003.