Animal research for ME

A discussion has arisen on the use of animals in biological research into ME.
I suspect there is insufficient data to create animal models of ME at the moment, but that may change in the future, for example using mice to test hypotheseis on potential causes of ME.

Medical research into comparable diseases such as Parkinson's and Multiple Sclerosis does use animal models.

I wanted to understand people's views on this:

If undertaken within good guidelines, is medical research of ME using animals (which may result in their death)?

 

They are already using mice, hamsters, primates (as far as I remember) and who knows what else.

Unless these animals have come up with some way of surviving having their brains, and other things, sliced, diced, and slivered, then they seem to normally end up dead.

They do not seem to want, or care, about people's approval, or otherwise, especially patients.

I answered 'not acceptable' not on moral grounds, but on ethical, as I have yet to see any non pointless animal model research into ME, and, IMO, if you're going to kill something it should be for good reason, and good reason is not simply to get funding for another year, or to add another pointless 10 papers to your output to increase your 'academic standing'..

 

As Wonko points out, there are some who claim to have an animal model already, but it is simply rodents exercised to exhaustion, so hardly a useful one.

Frankly, I would need to see the details before getting behind the idea of experimentation on animals for ME research. One person's "good guideline" will be different to someone elses, and the accuracy of any potential model and the reasoning of why the use of animal model is even necessary would need to be explained before I would be in favour.

 

Perhaps the question needs to be clarified because I presume what is being asked is whether you believe there are no circumstances under which animals should be experimented on.

 

I dislike people against animal research getting a veto on it.

Vegetarians for example don't consume dead animals.
However they don't get a veto stopping others from consuming dead animals.

I would argue there's a stronger case for blocking everyone consuming dead animals (i.e. forcing everyone to be vegetarians) because people have alternatives foods they can consume than blocking animal research, where there may be no good alternatives to certain lines of medical research that involve animals, which may mean we are left to suffer or die when that might not have been the case if animal research had been allowed.

 

For me the question needs unpacking:

• Is animal research into ME going to tell us anything meaningful at present? I think the answer to this is no. We are nowhere near a meaningful animal model of human ME, or even knowing which systems we should be investigating. Animal research may tell us about immune systems, mitochondrial function, gut floral, etc, but it is purely speculative as to whether any of this has any bearing on human ME.
• Is animal research going to answer questions about ME that can not be answered as well by other means? Given we do not even know the questions we need to ask, this is currently purely academic. I suspect even if we were further down the road of understanding the physiology of ME, I would remain sceptical that there could ever be sufficient overlap between what happens in other species and what happens in humans in relation to ME to justify animal research but that also is currently purely speculative.
• Is animal research ever justifiable under any circumstances? That is a separate issue to ME, but each individual needs to answer this question for themselves before responding to this poll.

My personal feeling is that we are a long way from being able gain anything meaningful from animal research in relation into ME, so we are also a long way away from being able to say that there are questions about ME that can only be answered by animal research, so at present, even if you think that animal research is theoretically acceptable, it can not currently be justified in relation to ME.

 

In my view, currently, the only experiment on animals worth trying in the context of ME research is to inject plasma or IgG from patients’ blood to mice (as was recently done for fibromyalgia), since there seems to be some factor in the blood of ME patients.

Some way of observing PEM, if at all present, would have to be devised — presumably having the mice run and observing their reaction to this exertion in the following days. Actigraphy could help in this regard.

In fact, I am surprised that no research group has shown interest in doing so so far.

Otherwise, animal research on ME seems pointless at this stage.

 

all of the above

 

It used to be a condition of the UK Home Office licences for animal research that the animals be euthanised. I am not sure if this is still the case, I started searching but am not alert enough this evening to locate the relevant information. There is a useful source of information on UK regulations on the University of Oxford website (see https://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/animal-research/UK-regulations-on-research-using-animals ), though these pages are very much pro use of animals in medical research.

My experience, over forty years ago now, was that this resulted practices such as testing drugs to the limit with such as giving extreme convulsant doses as the animals were due to be put down anyway.

 

Well that's an interesting case example. Do you think such research is acceptable or not acceptable?

A few people have said "well there isn't any current need" - yes, I get that. I am talking about the future.

For example: if a genetics study were to discover that people with ME lacked a certain gene, would it be acceptable or not acceptable to try and create a knock-out gene mouse, to understand the implications?

 

I posted this message in 2019, which links to some articles I wrote on Phoenix Rising. (I'm not capable now, but got a Masters degree in medical science.)

https://www.s4me.info/threads/animal-studies-why-are-we-not-doing-them.10298/page-2#post-184247

It looks at why animal research is cruel and irrelevant.

 

Given the pre-print released this weekend, showing that IgG from people with LongCovid, injected into mice caused the mice to exhibit symptoms, I felt this thread was relevant again.

was it a major strategic mistake to have done such little murine research into ME/CFS? What part of that trial couldn’t have been done 15 years ago?

 

I'll copy what I wrote on Phoenix Rising a while ago about creating an animal model of ME:

Although, I'm not completely sure of my position. If it takes giving a mouse mild ME to cure a person's severe ME, then maybe it's acceptable. But even then, the ME isn't the only factor in the animal's life.

I don't think a mouse or other animal can be happy, even in the best currently available circumstances, living its whole life as a lab experiment. It must be insanely stressful to be poked and prodded by these giant beings.

And when the experiment is done...as far as I know, almost all mice are killed with CO2 asphyxiation, likely a horribly agonizing death. Even though nitrogen asphyxiation is a painless option, CO2 is cheaper and easier, so that's what normally gets used.

 

Gases always used to be inexpensive & and I doubt that's changed - differences in price between nitrogen and carbon dioxide will probably be trivial. It's true that if you expose mice immediately to high concentration CO2 they will exhibit signs of distress but if you increase the flow rate more slowly that doesn't happen (and I understand that there are now purpose-built chambers with automatic flow control for this). In the UK there is a law dating from the 1980s that sets out a list of approved methods for different species and if you are a licensee you absolutely must be familiar with it.

 

More could be done but it wasn't because it has been very difficult to get funding for animal work in ME. I know people that tried years ago and never got up. I applied with a group last year but didn't get funded, that was more mechanistic to look at how EBV and RRV might go from acute to chronic but adding extra stress layers during acute infection phase. Animal work is ideal to look at acute emto chronic.

Have considered doing human fecal transplants from humans in to mice as well to study that impact. I remember several groups (not me) discussed adding human IgG from ME patients to mice a few years ago, not sure if it ever happened because of funding.

Plenty of SARS CoV work in mice and plenty of those working in mice have begun work on Long COVID. The funding leap isn't too high.

 

To be clear, I'm not a fan of mouse work but it can be necessary for answering certain questions on a system level.

Ethics is very strict for animal work in Australia. Most concern is for suffering. They would rather you kill more mice if it means the average of those mice suffer less. Average level of suffering matters most. Sacrificing is very controlled and minimal suffering is involved. As an example, forcing a mouse to run on a treadmill for 10 minutes is considered more on the moderate-to-extreme end of suffering that will be tolerated by ethics.

 

I think it much more likely that it was very sensible and that a new generation of researchers will repeat the mistakes of the 1970s and 1980s. Animal models of disease have been an almost complete waste of time and often misled people into looking at the wrong things for decades (in MS for instance). Mouse studies are very important for establishing how normal processes work. They are precious little use for modelling abnormal processes. I don't think they will answer any useful questions about the systems dynamics of human disease to be honest. It is nearly always completely different from the dynamics of experimental intervention.