The goal was to improve the drug pre-screening process for Alzheimer’s disease, Snell said.
“By far and away the most value these animals will have is the pre-clinical testing of potential treatments, to throw away the ones that won’t work, [and] to refine the list to the ones that do, so that they can then go on into human clinical trials.”
Sheep served as excellent models for Alzheimer’s disease research due to their longer life span, complex brain structure, and genetic similarity to humans, Snell said.
Many drugs that performed well in rodents failed in human clinical trials and those trials could cost upwards of a billion dollars to run, he said.