Re: New Diabetes Encapsulation Web Site
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Posted by Scott R. King on 11:57:09 2009/07/03
In Reply to:
Re: New Diabetes Encapsulation Web Site posted by Jay
Jay-
If you are interested in metabolism, no, there is no point in doing mouse experiments. Prof. Bergman, who considers himself a type 2 researcher, does almost nothing in rodents. His standard model is dogs.
There are a couple of reasons why these things happen. First, it is much easier to get funding for mouse experiments, because the budget is much smaller than large animal experiments. Second, and you touched on this, transplantation researchers really are not interested in metabolism and don't know much about it. Everyone in metabolism knows the Bergman Minimal Model. I am not aware of anyone in islet transplantation that knows it.
I'll tell a story. A few years ago I was at a scientific meeting and as usual the islet transplant researcher was showing mouse glucose tolerance tests and claiming that this proved his transplanted islets were responding to glucose. (As you know it only proves that the islets were making some insulin, not when they secreted it.) I must have been feeling ornery because I got up and explained that all mouse GGTs are identical and why. Fifty islet researchers just stared at me like I was mad.
So they continue to measure and publish mouse GTTs.
In our research we use rats, not mice, and we are not much interested in the rat metabolic results (except fasting blood sugar). We are interested in how the rats tolerate Islet Sheets, that is, whether there is an inflammatory reaction. Rats are useful for that (and cheaper than large animals).
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