Thread by @ydeigin

@BetterSkeptics #gtcentry Unsupported claim:

[00:11:10] "what I believe is a flaw in the drug safety system. I published this flaw. And, uh, the flaw basically amounts to the mice that are often used for things like drug safety testing and other experiments having been

https://twitter.com/evolving_string/status/1416956278492913664

"accidentally evolutionarily modified by the breeding protocol that is used to produce them so that their telomeres which are these, um, repetitive sequences at the ends of chromosomes have been elongated tremendously and has, uh, has potentially very large impacts.

"Effectively, these animals have a capacity to repair their tissues so that if you poison them, but you don't outright kill them, they actually have an extremely good capacity to fix themselves whereas we have a limited capacity, so they're-they're bad models.

...you and I have a kind of uneasy relationship when we opened the medicine cabinet because we know that virtually every drug in there was tested against mice that are very, very capable of dealing with toxicity, and so we don't know."

RESPONSE:

No evidence to support said flaw in the drug testing system. Telomere length has no documented effect on how well mice can tolerate toxic insults.

Moreover, drugs must be tested in SEVERAL animal species for safety before being allowed to be tested in humans.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK24645/

After safety is confirmed in animal species, the drugs are then tested in healthy humans to make sure they are safe before any efficacy testing is done in Phases 2 and 3.