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Comment by i000 | Hacker News Reader

Please, your statement is so ambiguous that it makes almost no sense.

1. Which mouse? An inbred laboratory possibly immunodeficient strain, a genetically engineered mouse to GET cancer at a high rate, or maybe a wild type free-range mouse?

2. Which cancer? Do you realize that it is almost impossible to get realistic models of prostate cancer or that mice simply live to short to get colorectal cancer - even when the relevant mutations are introduced?

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Sorry if I was being ambiguous. All mice are less resistant to cancer than humans, even wild type mice. Mice in nature rarely live long enough to get cancer, but if you put them up in a mouse retirement home (lab), a large percentage of wild mice will get spontaneous cancers.

Yes mouse cancer in not a great model for human cancer and we probably should not be using mice - about the only good thing they have going for them as a model is they are small and cheap.

Personally I would like to see us using pets (dogs and cats) much more as their cancers are a much better match to human cancers in both how they develop and how they progress. That we are not taking better advantage of this resource to develop new treatments is a tragedy.

I suspect one reason could be that mice have much faster metabolisms than humans. Also, typically the speed of metabolism is typically inversely correlated with size, although there definitely are some outliers too.

Mice have far few cells than humans so they should be much less likely to get cancer (all things being equal). Peto’s paradox is all about this effect [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox

But those cells burn at a lot higher rate.

And wow, the "related articles" were actually useful for once. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151031-the-animal-that-does... mentions duplicating the gene in mice: 2 copies seems to be the sweet spot.

Yes but not a billion time more. The relative resistance of human cells to cancer compared to mice is more than just about metabolism.

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