Laboratory mice

'In mice': Why these two words will change how you read hyped-up health headlines

By Kimberly Gillan|

Whether it's headlines about drinking coffee to cure Alzheimer's, green tea to fight obesity or that shift work causes breast cancer, most of us have clicked on incredible-sounding science stories in our bid for wellbeing.

The trouble is, many of them are based on research into mice and it very much depends on the news outlet – and the particular writer or editor – whether that's made clear to the reader.

Now US-based Australian scientist James Heathers has taken it upon himself to highlight the importance of adding the words "in mice" to headlines via a Twitter account @justsaysinmice, which calls out sensationalist headlines missing these vital words.

And the movement appears to be gaining traction, with the account already amassing 63,000 followers since its launch in April.

It's not to say that mice studies aren't relevant, but Heathers is at pains to point out that they are very much a science starting point — and the trouble with headlines promising cancer/Alzheimer's/depression cures based off rodents is that there's a high chance they won't turn out to be relevant to humans.

"Imagine how it feels as you're slowly sliding into early-onset dementia and people keep recommending which brand of spirulina to buy because they saw it in a 'study'," he says.

"You'd be surprised what people turn into advice; what they take from things and what they choose to act on. When we click our fingers and see the shiny, new result [reported online], a lot of the time it needs to be tempered with the context of everything else that's happened beforehand."

Heathers says the average drug or treatment takes between five and 10 years and around $1.4 billion to go from lightbulb moment to actionable treatment.

"Overall, the chance of making it the whole way through [from idea to useable medication or treatment] is somewhere between one and 10 and one and 30," he says.

Broadly speaking, the process usually starts with scientists coming up with a mechanism or proposed drug or desired change and testing the idea in cell cultures in a lab to get an understanding for how it might play out.

"After you've done the mechanism, in terms of putting drug A on a cell B and something happens, then we'll put the drug into a live animal that has something right or wrong with it that's related to what we want to measure," Heathers explains.

"Once we've done it with the animal model and the animal model makes sense, we go into phase 1 trials [where] generally healthy people sign up and get paid a ton of money to take a reasonably small, titrated amount of the drug."

If the volunteers in phase one and two emerge alive and well, the drug is deemed safe to continue studying.

"[At phase three], instead of giving [something like] an Alzheimer's drug to people and saying, 'Look, they didn't fall over dead immediately! Isn't that great?' we start giving it to people with Alzheimer's disease," he says.

The chances of a drug passing phase three and four of clinical trials and making it to market are slim, but Heathers says that's not enough to dishearten scientists because there's always something to learn.

"If your job is to find out about the process, [so] if what you find out … is that this whole approach doesn't work, then you actually know something," he says.

"Not everything is a binary achievement where you get an outcome and the outcome helps a great deal to do something – it doesn't really work like that."

In fact, Heathers says most scientists understand that much of their work may not be useful for many years, or even in their own lifetime.

"[New developments] are the culmination generally of somewhere between 500 and 400 years' worth of continual research on a topic," he says.

"We're working on a project right now and it's going to be years before we know whether or not it's actually going to work – I probably won't even be here."

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