“Efforts to study the female reproductive system have long been set back by societal stigma—but also by the problematic fact that most laboratory animals don’t menstruate. Now, researchers have engineered mice that get a period in response to certain drugs, according to a preprint posted to bioRxiv this month.”
“In the new work, Harvard University reproductive biologist Kara McKinley and colleagues engineered standard lab mice’s endometrium to react to signals at work in menstruating animals. They equipped the cells with a receptor protein that, when activated by a drug, amplifies their sensitivity to calcium, a trigger of decidualization.”
News article may have paywall but the preprint itself doesn’t. The preprint in question: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.08.681007v1
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Hopefully they can find better treatments for people that menstrate with this but also poor mice that sucks
poor mice that sucks
Part of the necessary evils of doing science… there is the saying that the lab mice is the one who sacrificed the most for scientific research. Also there’s this cool monument in Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mouse
From a scientific standpoint I hope they can do something useful with this technology too
It would be interesting what kind of effects this might have on the mice, since they would be used to mouse estrous cycles, rather than human ones.
something something jetpacks…
Exploiting animals in the name of feminism 👏
Would you rather them experiment on human women?
I would rather people did worthwhile research.
So you think researching how things affect women isn’t worthwhile?
