The quest for better lab mice could come down to the gut

Mice are indispensable contributors to the cause of scientific advancement, but they’re not always the most trustworthy guides. Countless new therapies have cured murine disease only to hopelessly fail when tried on actual humans.

That might be in part because lab mice lack the microbiome diversity of everyday creatures. As STAT’s Shraddha Chakradhar reports, a group of scientists crafted a way to breed what they call “wildling mice,” test subjects who retain their genetic engineering but inherit a naturalistic microbiome from outside-the-lab surrogates.

Scientists exposed them to a pair of therapies that had previously showed promise in mice but proved useless for humans and found that the hybrid creatures appeared more predictive than their forebears.

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