Interviewee: Mario Capecchi. Mario Capecchi talks about the advantages of working with mice to study genetic disorders. (DNAi Location: Applications > Genes and medicine > Gene targeting > Animal models Mouse models)

So one of the advantages of working with mice is that in humans if something's wrong with you, you go to the doctor and then he can see what's happening, he'll say maybe you have cystic fibrosis, but he can't go backwards in time and simply start studying the disease from the time you go. If we generate for example mice which have cystic fibrosis and which actually we have, then we can actually look retrospectively, we can look, we can make many, many mice that have just cystic fibrosis, we can look at all stages of embryogenesis, and then post-birth and very carefully look at the pathology of that disease throughout time, and that way get a much greater detailed analysis of the disease. And then at the same time you can turn it around, and once you understand the disease in much greater detail, then you can actually start using the mouse as a model for developing new therapeutics.

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