Japanese doctor touches extremities of science

Dr Nomura created his immune deficient mice in 1983and started with the grafting of human tissues in 1985. It took him 13 years to succeed in his experiment, and it was only in 1997 that cancer was induced in the human tissues. The “paper on the morphology and function of human benign tumours and normal thyroid tissues in scid mice’ appeared in 1998 in Cancer Letters, proving his success in studying what would be quite impossible in human individuals.

“I was afraid that when I presented the paper, there might be talks of harvesting human organs for transplantation… That seems to be impossible, because a human organ is big, and mice are very small,” says Dr Nomura. The finger that grew out of a cell injected from an aborted embryo – ten times from 5 mm within four months – is just the latest development, a yardstick, so to say, of the immense possibilities of the experiment. The final frontier for the programme in the department of Radiation Biology, Osaka University, is to grow the entire human organ system and see how it reacts to endogenousand exogenous factors. “The issue is to know what happens in human bodies. Since we cannot experiment on human beings, this is the next option,” he points out.

Commenting on the need to spend much more on the study of cancer, Dr Nomura remarked that the incidence of cancer has not reduced, only increased across the world. It stands at a challenging 25 per cent, and since it is difficult to treat cancer specifically, one needs to see how it progresses before one can attack it for prevention.

“With the scid system,” Dr Nomura is confident, “one can learn the precise process of the spread of cancer and how to treat it. One could experiment with either immunotherapy or chemotherapy”.

What worries Dr Nomura is the continued interest of especially American drug companies on using the scid mice for drug tests. “We can check the use of toxic drugs on the human tissues, but I am not interested in that,” he affirms.