Mice with human genes can grow our own medicine
Inventions
By engineering laboratory mice to carry human genetic blueprints, researchers are turning tiny animals into living factories for the world's most sophisticated medicines.
The greatest hurdle in modern medicine is that our bodies are too good at their jobs; they often attack life-saving drugs as if they were invading bacteria. To bypass this, scientists have created humanized mice by replacing the animal's natural immune instructions with human genetic code. When these mice are exposed to a pathogen, they don't produce mouse antibodies—they produce perfectly formed human ones that our bodies will readily accept without rejection.