Drugs and the Mouse: Pharmacology, Pharmacogenetics, and Pharmacogenomics

Publisher Summary The mouse is the best laboratory animal model for studying clinical pharmacology, pharmacogenetics, and pharmacogenomics for the many reasons that are put forth in this chapter. Compared with yeast, worm, or fly the mouse has organs and tissues very similar to the human and is only 80 million years diverged from human. The rat and other mammals do not have the transgenesis possibilities, congenic lines, recombinant inbred lines, quantitative trait loci-mapping possibilities, and transchromosomal lines that the mouse has. There are fewer than 300 unique genes between mouse and human; all remaining genes have orthologues or homologues. Future studies of knockout, knockin, humanized, and other transgenic mouse lines—in combination with systems biology platforms and gene knock-down technology using RNA interference—provides invaluable data with regard to drug discovery, drug development, and understanding how any candidate drug can be efficacious or detrimental to patients or certain subsets of the human population.