My name is David Taylor and I'm a cancer survivor.
I know that my survival
and the survival of thousands of people like me depended on animal research
and I wanted to ask you some questions about the research you do with
with your colleagues here at Barts in London Medical School.
My particular research is focused around ovarian cancer
and also not just the malignant cells in the cancer
but the other half of the cancer.
You may think
that cancer is all about
malignant cells and you may think that a cancer is essentially
a lump of malignant cells,
but within that
cancer
at least 50% of
the cells
will be normal cells of the body that are recruited
by the cancer to help it grow and spread, the blood vessels but also cells
of the immune system and builder cells because
cancer is a bit like a rogue organ, does that make sense?
Is that
we cannot model the complexity of this rogue organ
entirely
if we do it
ex-vivo, i.e., out of the body
growing it in the laboratory.
It's just
too complex, we don't have the technology we can't even
create
a normal organ, people try now with tissue enginerring too grow
new kidneys for kidney patients
we can't do that. It's even more complicated.
Although
a majority of our research
is carried out in the lab
using computers and also very importantly using patients samples
one component, one part of the jigsaw puzzle
is supplied
by working
in mouse models of cancer.
These days one hears more and more about
alternatives
to using animals. Many things we can do without animals
and all of us who do research with
using animals, cancer research using animals
it is part of our ethos
it is in our DNA if you like
to reduce, refine and replace
so
we don't want to use animals and we only use mice
in my type of cancer research, in fact really in cancer research in general
the vast majority of research is done
on mice or
zebra fish
but we only use them
if there is no alternative
and it is
the thing like understanding the entire cancer
which is very important and I will come back to that in a minute
and the other thing is understanding how cancer spreads
because as a cancer spreads, the cancer cell probably helped by some by some of those other
cells in the cancer
has to
leave
its first location, it has to then get into a blood vessel or a lymphatic
it has to travel round the body, then it has to get out of that vessel
go somewhere else and set up
another deposit.
Metastases kills,
metastases kills, it is not the primary tumors that kills in most cases, it is metastases.
A lot of people
will say, in what way at all are mice relevant
to human beings? You could say what does a hairy nocturnal animal got to do
with a 2 legged non hairy
animal that generally isn't nocturnal, or most of us are not nocturnal.
The fact is that
most of the hormones
most of the organs
most of the immune system
and anything else you can name of a mouse
is exactly the same as in humans.
There are important differences and we can't
completely translate
from mouse to man.
A model is a model is a model.
To me
mouse models for cancer
are as important as
the tissue culture we do, the molecular biology we do
the computer models we use, the computer programs we use
all of these fit together
the patient samples
but the mouse model just add
an important dimention, give us important information.
I have heared that
every year more and more mice
are being used and medical research in the United Kingdom is not true or?
It is true at the moment and there is a very good reason for that.
That is because of all the advances we have made in genetic engnerring and
in understanding DNA
from mouse and humans
what we are able to do
is we have say 20 or 30 thousand genes, in human genes and
many many many 80, 85%. I should know the exact figure
but it is between 80 - 90 % for all our genes
are exactly the same as a mouse's genes. They do the same job.
We need to know to cure many diseases and understand many diseases
what every gene does in our body.
You are able to find that out or get very very close information
on that, accurate information
by knocking that gene out in a mouse
and finding out
what happens. You can find out a lot about that gene if you do that.
Now, it is not going to tell you everything.
and it is not going to be the end of the story
but just at this moment in time there is a bulge in
mouse numbers.
Because we are knocking out all of the genes,
in a few years time, we will have all of that information.
We won't need to do these experiments again.
People talk about or one
hears about personalised medicine or personalised or highly personalised
therapies for cancer being dveloped in the future. With
this happening, can
using mice as models
for research still make sense? Yes, absolutely because
what is clear... I'll use the example of the cancer I work on, ovarian cancer.
We used to say ovarian cancer rises from the ovary
and it spreads throughout the peritoneal cavity,
now
it's only in the last 5 years this has become
true, is that
the major form of ovarian cancer that kills women arises in the fallopian tube
not the ovary.
Other forms of ovarian cancer,
don't
come from the ovary, they come from the gut and they metastasizes in the peritoneum
other forms come from the uterus,
and so
ovarian caner
is actually not ovarian canver, it is a number of different sub-types.
With that information, genetic driver
we can make genetic models of all those different sub-types.
Some anti vivisection campaigners
have called medical research using animals a false science what would use
say to them.
No it is not a false science, it is a component of
medical research.
Does animal research
play as important or essential a role today in the discovery of new treatments and
therapies?
Yes, it is still
an essential component. What has happened ofcourse is that we have
so much more,
so many more tools at our disposal
and so many different ways of doing bio-medical research compared with 50
years ago which is amazing, and the
pace of research
the pace for instance of cancer research is just extraordinary and awesome
and exciting.
We still need those biological models, we still need
to do
some of the work
in mouse models of cancer
to prove
things
there have been found in other systems
to be true
and also to test new treatments.
Can a computer nowadays or cell cultures
replicate these things? Cell cultures can do some things very very definitely,
a computer can do some things
but if you want to study the complexity of the tumor micro-environment, all of
the cells that make up that rogue organ that is cancer,
if you want to study metasteses, which is what kills patients, at
some point you have to go into mouse models.
The new focus on genetics, on the DNA side of things
makes the use of mice even more relevant and necessary in a strange way.
Yes it does because
we see an increasing
complexity in the number of
tumor types and sub types
and it makes it even more important to be able to model that in a mouse.
and the use of more
DNA and and genetics based therapies
does that mean that how we use the animals in research
yes absolutely
we use
I'm thinking of...
a genetic model of pancreatic cancer in mice that another group tend to use
the whole time
and whereas before maybe we would use
very large numbers of mice, what
they do now, is use much smaller numbers of mice that you keep alive
for almost their entire life span because
the cancers develop
very late on, as they often do, usually do in humans, and
there will be screening techniques to pick those counters up early, which stops the
mice suffering.
The techniques that you use on patients like ultrasounds,
MRI, pet scanning
are increasingly being used in mice
so we can get an enormous amount of information, out of one single little
mouse
you know and so we use less mice
it costs us more money because we have to keep them for longer
from an ethical point of view and the
reality of
how it relates to human cancers
it is a much better system, you can almost say that we have mouse hospitals now
and in some places
they actually say in some research institutes, they say we have a mouse hospital and
so
you would detect a cancer early in your mouse and then you predict
into
a mouse clinical trial
and that is sufficient of many researchers at the moment.
If I can ask about the role of
medical or animal research
in
detection and prevention
of cancers? Well, again I think it is aboslutely critical because
now we have this genetic models
and we know that they evolve like
the human disease
then you can do a lot of pilot
experiments in mice to see
how soon you can detect things, for instance
there is a lot of
nano technology approaches to look at mutated DNA in the blood of
people
when you can use the mouse models
as your first
pass to find the best technique.
Looking to the future,
how do you see research
into cancers and cancer treatments developing?
We are in the golden age of cancer research, I think the progress is staggering
and very exciting
so we in a much better place than we were 10 years ago
but we are also uncovering a greater complexity.
On the other side
I think that combining some of these new treatments
with treatments the target the micro environment and the immune system
and manipulate that
which maybe we think have a
broader
a broader application
than some of the very specialized
targeted treatments
that I think that is the exciting way forward
but coming back to the animals
the only way we can really prove that
they have potential in patients
is after a lot of other work
we are going to have to go back
to the mouse models