Scopeblog Stanford: Stanford immunologist pushes field to shift its research focus from mice to humans (about Mark Davis)

Scopeblog Stanford: Stanford immunologist pushes field to shift its research focus from mice to humans

For the last several years, Stanford immunologist Mark Davis, PhD, has been pushing the immunology field to steer research away from a reliance on mice and toward humans. He recently talked about his reasons for this in a Q&A piece in Annual Reviews' science-friendly online magazine Knowable.

 

This is interesting (look away if you don't want to read the punchline to the article!):

“We’ve cured cancer and autoimmune disease in mice many times over,” Davis likes to say. And he says a colleague of his often starts his talks with the salutation: “For the mice in the audience, I have wonderful news!”​

I was just wondering yesterday (after the talk at the Stanford symposium of wanting to find a cure for ME/CFS) whether medicine has actually managed to cure any chronic disease/condition other than those caused by ongoing infections and structural defects. (I'm not sure how to think about cancer - I don't know if it's claimed that any specific type can be cured in all cases who have it.)

Are we in the class of things that can be cured?

@Jonathan Edwards?

 

Sasha,
Fabulous question, indeed.

 

Until death has been cured I am not sure that the term cure is ever more than an asymptote of hope. But is cure necessary? Lot of conditions are kept under complete control for years - and often until something else ends the story. We have to eat food to keep alive. We are not without requirements. Maybe taking some extras like insulin or anti-TNF should be considered in the same vein.

But there are quite a lot of pretty reliable cures around. Surgery cures buckets of things. Lots of cancers are cured in most cases - probably the majority. Vitamin D cures rickets.

Autoimmune diseases ought to be curable but sadly people do not seem to be focusing on trying out sensible strategies at present. Drug trials in autoimmune disease have lost the plot as far as I can see. Immune thrombocytopenia seems to be curable in 30% of cases.

I find it hard to guess whether ME might be curable. If it is primarily an abnormal brain signalling problem then maybe it could be dealt with like tinnitus. I used to have very unpleasant tinnitus but now that I wear hearing aids I no longer have it - not even when I am not wearing my hearing aids. My brain has learnt that the tinnitus was a misreading of its world. Maybe ME will turn out to be due to a deficit of a transmitter, so that it can be treated like Parkinson's with L-dopa. That may not seem to be a cure but it could potentially mean full health.

 

Well that's a fine way to start my Sunday morning.