• Question: How and what are you testing your new drugs on and how will that differ from if you were to test on humans, or what your product is aimed at?

    Asked by to Amy, Anita, Daryl, Nimesh, Sandra on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Anita Thomas

      Anita Thomas answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Dear jonzothebeast,

      I have been involved in Phase 1 human trials.. This is when healthy volunteers are given the treatment, and monitored for any changes that may occur. I was vomited on once with this – somebody had had too good a night the night before! But no human (clinical) studies are performed before the drugs are tested in animal trials. Usually treatments are tested in a number of small animal (eg mice, rats) models for efficacy (if they work), pharmacology (what doses is needed), toxicology (how harmful they are) and then are studied in large animal models. We use large animals, as they’re anatomy and responses are often similar to humans (or more similar than rodents). These are called pre-clinical trails. I’m involved in all of these phases. We cannot test a new treatment on humans until we have tested it in appropriate animal models – successfully!

    • Photo: Amy Monaghan

      Amy Monaghan answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      Hi Jonzothebeast

      Ace question. So I am involved right at the beginning of pre-clinical drug testing in the discovery phase. This means I’m identifying drugs by testing them on specific human proteins in immortal human cells.

      Whilst this means that the drugs should work in humans eventually – there is a long process that will have to be done before it is safe to test them there. After cells other scientists test the drugs on human tumours in animals – known as “xenograft” models. This givens them a better idea if the drug will work inside an organism rather than just one cell, because the body can do lots of things to change a drug before it even gets to where we want it to work. We also need animal studies to check the drug is safe and doesn’t have unexpected effects elsewhere.

      After this the drug can be tested in humans. Normally this is done in healthy volunteers at an extremely low dose, but because my drugs are cancer drugs, they are often offered to people in which all other treatments have failed first.

      Amy

    • Photo: Daryl Jones

      Daryl Jones answered on 26 Jun 2014:

      Hey jonzothebeast (awesome name!)

      We are testing on mice- mice are about 99% similar to humans in terms of genes, so we think we have a good understanding of how the drug will work in humans. Having said that, the human brain is far more complex than a mouse brain, and our drugs works on the brain, so perhaps a human brain, having so many more different areas, would not respond in the same way to the drug as a mouse brain would!!

      GOOD question! I like your thinking!

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