Mighty mice for sale -- mighty expensive at least
When it comes to the price of mice, you pay extra for defects.
A mouse with arthritis runs close to $200; two pairs of epileptic mice can cost 10 times that. You want three blind mice? That'll run you about $250. And for your own custom mouse, with the genetic modification of your choosing, expect to pay as much as $100,000.
Always a mainstay of scientific research, mice have become a critical tool in the quest for new drugs and medical treatments because their genes are remarkably similar to a person's.
With proper manipulation -- either by man or nature -- a set of mouse genes can produce an animal with just about any human ailment, or a reasonable facsimile of it. Strains of mice that succumb to Alzheimer's disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer and countless other conditions are being used to study both the illnesses themselves and potential treatments. As many as 25 million mice are now used in experiments each year.
Where do they come from? Where else? Mouse farms.
Depending on the specific genetic manipulation, the cost to create a custom mouse is usually in the tens of thousands of dollars. Once the line has been established, individual animals can run into the hundreds.
"Not that much to pay if you want to see how a disease affects a mammal or how a drug is going to work," said Lee Silver, a Princeton University biologist who has worked with mice since 1978.
This year the NIH spent $10 million to purchase 250 strains of knockout mice, along with detailed information about their physiology, from two biotechnology companies, California's Deltagen and Lexicon Genetics of The Woodlands, Texas. The acquisition is just an "hors d'oeuvre" for a much larger international effort to create a knockout strain for every one of the mouse's 20,000 to 25,000 genes, said Chris Austin, director of the National Institute of Health's Chemical Genomics Center.
When it comes to the price of mice, you pay extra for defects.
A mouse with arthritis runs close to $200; two pairs of epileptic mice can cost 10 times that. You want three blind mice? That'll run you about $250. And for your own custom mouse, with the genetic modification of your choosing, expect to pay as much as $100,000.
Always a mainstay of scientific research, mice have become a critical tool in the quest for new drugs and medical treatments because their genes are remarkably similar to a person's.
With proper manipulation -- either by man or nature -- a set of mouse genes can produce an animal with just about any human ailment, or a reasonable facsimile of it. Strains of mice that succumb to Alzheimer's disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer and countless other conditions are being used to study both the illnesses themselves and potential treatments. As many as 25 million mice are now used in experiments each year.
Where do they come from? Where else? Mouse farms.
Depending on the specific genetic manipulation, the cost to create a custom mouse is usually in the tens of thousands of dollars. Once the line has been established, individual animals can run into the hundreds.
"Not that much to pay if you want to see how a disease affects a mammal or how a drug is going to work," said Lee Silver, a Princeton University biologist who has worked with mice since 1978.
This year the NIH spent $10 million to purchase 250 strains of knockout mice, along with detailed information about their physiology, from two biotechnology companies, California's Deltagen and Lexicon Genetics of The Woodlands, Texas. The acquisition is just an "hors d'oeuvre" for a much larger international effort to create a knockout strain for every one of the mouse's 20,000 to 25,000 genes, said Chris Austin, director of the National Institute of Health's Chemical Genomics Center.
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