Clinical trials are the backbone of medical research, and are often the last step in the development of new therapies for use in patients. Prior to human testing, however, preclinical studies using animal subjects are usually performed in order to provide initial data on the safety and effectiveness of prospective treatments. These studies can be costly and time consuming, and may also raise co...

The development of stroke drugs has been characterized by success in animal studies and subsequent failure in clinical trials. Animal studies might have overstated efficacy, or clinical trials might have understated efficacy; in either case we need to better understand the reasons for failure. Techniques borrowed from clinical trials have recently allowed the impact of publication and study-qua...

Collecting and analysing all available literature before starting an animal experiment is important and it is indispensable when writing a systematic review (SR) of animal research. Writing such review prevents unnecessary duplication of animal studies and thus unnecessary animal use (Reduction). One of the factors currently impeding the production of 'high-quality' SRs in laboratory animal sci...

To better translate basic research findings into the clinic, we are moving away from the traditional one-gene-one-phenotype model towards the discovery of complex mechanisms. In this Editorial, the new Editor-in-Chief and Senior Editors of Disease Models & Mechanisms (DMM) discuss the role that the journal will play in this transition. DMM will continue to provide a platform for studies that br...

The evaluation of vaccine safety involves pre-clinical animal studies, pre-licensure randomized clinical trials, and post-licensure safety studies. Sequential design and analysis are of particular interest because they allow early termination of the trial or quick detection that the vaccine exceeds a prescribed bound on the adverse event rate. After a review of the recent developments in this a...

While some historians have noted the absence of animals in medical history, few have made the animal the central object of their historical gaze. Twenty years ago W.F. Bynum urged medical historians to follow historians of science in paying attention to the role of non-human animals in the material practices of medicine. Yet few have responded to his call. In this paper we again ask the questio...

BACKGROUND Systematic Reviews (SRs) of experimental animal studies are not yet common practice, but awareness of the merits of conducting such SRs is steadily increasing. As animal intervention studies differ from randomized clinical trials (RCT) in many aspects, the methodology for SRs of clinical trials needs to be adapted and optimized for animal intervention studies. The Cochrane Collaborat...

Research involving animal models is crucial for the advancement of science, provided that experiments are designed, performed, interpreted, and reported well. In order to investigate the quality of reporting of articles in otorhinolaryngology research using animal models, a PubMed database search was conducted to retrieve eligible articles. The checklist of the ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reportin...

More than 65 loci, encoding up to 500 different genes, have been implicated by genome-wide association studies (GWAS) as conferring an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D). Whilst mouse models have in the past been central to understanding the mechanisms through which more penetrant risk genes for T2D, for example, those responsible for neonatal or maturity-onset diabetes of the y...