Is the mouse model sufficient for human drug design?
That depends on who you ask [laughs]. The problem is that our pathway to develop drugs in the past has always gone through mice. So it’s no surprise that when you look at existing drugs, the mice predict how the drug acts in humans, because otherwise they wouldn’t have been used in the first place. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. My bias is that the human disease looks nothing like the mouse disease. Pathologically, you don’t see the same spectrum of lesions. Mice don’t even normally get tuberculosis, and so it’s not a great leap of logic to say that drug activities will differ between the two. What’s so tricky about developing a TB vaccine? All the vaccinologists will accuse me of using this as a cop-out answer, but I’ll say it anyway. One of the trickiest things about TB is that there is no natural immunity to reinfection. People get reinfected all the time. I think if exposure to the normal bacteria doesn’t confer any protective advantage on the host, then you’re going to have to d
