Worms on drugs: How well can C. elegans predict drug toxicity in mammals?
One can kill nematodes by feeding them any number of noxious chemicals, but how effectively can worms predict potential human toxicity of drug leads? Also, given that the dosage is often the difference between a remedy or a poison, how well does the dosage of a drug translate between worms and humans? If worms lack most of the organ systems that would be key targets of drug toxicity, then how do we test toxicity in organ systems that the worms don’t have? We will discuss how InVivo Biosystems addresses these questions when using C. elegans as a model for drug testing.
