(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Laboratory mice have played a huge rule in many of medicines most important breakthroughs. But a new era may be dawning in the world of lab research, one that may mean fewer mice and more humans.

Immunologist Mark Davis, Ph.D., a researcher at Stanford University, says the time has come for immunologists to start weaning themselves off of experimental rodents and to embark on bolder research of the causes and treatments of human-specific diseases.

"We seem to be in a state of denial, where there is so much invested in the mouse model that it seems almost unthinkable to look elsewhere," Dr. Davis, writes in his essay published in the journal Immunity.

He calls for the current mouse-centered, small-laboratory approach to be supplemented by a broad industrial-scale "systems biology" approach like the one that unraveled the human genome.

In his essay, Dr. Davis explains that humans and rodents are separated by some 65 million years of evolutionary divergence from a common ancestor. This makes for vast differences that are usually noted once research moves beyond rodent testing and into human models. Also, humans are exposed to an array of elements in their daily lives, that a lab mouse will never come in contact with, meaning mouse conditions will never accurately mirror human conditions.

"Think about what we can do with people. People come to hospitals, get vaccinations, give blood and tissue samples for routine lab tests and clinical trials. We're not learning nearly as much as we could from these samples. As with the recent history of human genetics, we could be much bolder," Dr. Davis was quoted as saying.

Dr. Davis says he sees a need for a national or international infrastructure to capture information from human blood and tissue samples.

SOURCE: Immunity, 2009