The winners of the Daily Telegraph young science writer awards were announced today. In the category for 15- to 19-year-olds, Arron Rodrigues, was the ‘stand-out candidate’ for his piece describing use of nanotechnology to successfully treat cancer in mice. Not afraid of his difficult and doubly contentious subject matter, Arron started:

For every 5,000 drugs that enter pre-clinical testing in the US, on average only five are ever tested on humans, and only one approved for use. This puts into context the many ‘magic bullet’ treatments that we hear so much about. However, as a result of promising lab results, Nanospectra Biosciences has gained approval to ‘commence a human trial in patients with head and neck cancer’ this year using ‘AuroLase Therapy’.

He continued:

The pioneering research was led by Dr Jennifer West at Rice University in Texas, before the technology was licensed to Nanospectra, based in Houston. West’s laboratory exposed mice with cancerous tumours to tiny ‘nanoshells’ and a special laser, which beams light similar to that used in your TV remote ….

One scientist quoted by Arron cautioned that the risks of nanoparticles could outweigh the benefits. But any debate about the use of mice in medical research was clearly not considered relevant to the piece.

Of course the antivivisectionists are quick to latch onto statistics such as only 1 in 5000 drugs getting approved for human use. Last week our young friends at Speaking of Research (the US counterpart of Pro-Test) were busy debunking the oft-quoted ‘92% of drugs that pass animal tests fail human trials’ statistic. We have addressed such nonsense several times on this blog.

Tom at Speaking of Research points out that you can use statistics allied with assumptions to ‘prove’ anything. He comes up with his own (hypothetical) case that 90.5% of dangerous drugs have been kept out of human trials thanks to animal safety tests.