Question: what are the rats used for

Zahra Massoud answered on 27 Nov 2020:

I use mice in my research, as a model for ovarian cancer. As much as it’s helpful to look at ovarian cancer cells in a dish, and test drugs on those to see how they respond, a living system is much more complicated than anything we can create in a lab yet. We have to use mice to see how a drug might affect cancer in a living system, to show how those complexities might cause different behaviour than in our cell models. It’s especially important for safety reasons – to make sure a living animal doesn’t get any bad side effects that a human patient could also get.

We therefore use mice to test the drugs that we have shown kill cancer in cells. We treat mice with cancer, and see how the drug affects their tumours, to see whether it could become a new medicine in humans.