Mitchell Donald, Sengpiel Frank
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience,Dalhousie University,Halifax,NS,Canada.
School of Biosciences and Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute,Cardiff University,Cardiff,Wales,UK.
Vis Neurosci. 2018 Jan;35:E017. doi: 10.1017/S0952523817000244.
Unquestionably, the last six decades of research on various animal models have advanced our understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the many complex characteristics of amblyopia as well as provided promising new avenues for treatment. While animal models in general have served an important purpose, there nonetheless remain questions regarding the efficacy of particular models considering the differences across animal species, especially when the goal is to provide the foundations for human interventions. Our discussion of these issues culminated in three recommendations for future research to provide cohesion across animals models as well as a fourth recommendation for acceptance of a protocol for the minimum number of steps necessary for the translation of results obtained on particular animal models to human clinical trials. The three recommendations for future research arose from discussions of various issues including the specific results obtained from the use of different animal models, the degree of similarity to the human visual system, the ability to generate animal models of the different types of human amblyopia as well as the difficulty of scaling developmental timelines between different species.
毫无疑问，过去六十年来对各种动物模型的研究增进了我们对弱视诸多复杂特征背后机制的理解，也为治疗提供了有前景的新途径。虽然一般而言动物模型起到了重要作用，但考虑到不同动物物种之间的差异，尤其是当目标是为人类干预提供基础时，特定模型的有效性仍存在问题。我们对这些问题的讨论最终形成了三项关于未来研究的建议，以在动物模型之间实现连贯性，还有第四项建议，即接受一个方案，该方案规定了将在特定动物模型上获得的结果转化为人类临床试验所需的最少步骤数量。这三项关于未来研究的建议源于对各种问题的讨论，包括使用不同动物模型获得的具体结果、与人类视觉系统的相似程度、生成不同类型人类弱视动物模型的能力，以及不同物种之间扩展发育时间线的难度。
