Animal models recapitulating the immune features of chronic hepatitis B (CHB) are very limited. An Osaka University research team has developed a novel murine model of CHB and tested the efficacy and immunomodulating effects of interferon-α (IFN-α) therapy.
Male infertility affects approximately 20% to 70% of infertile couples mostly due to decreased sperm count, sperm motility and/or morphological abnormalities.
Self-organizing organoids resembling specific regions of the nervous system, including human cortical organoids (hCO), can be generated and used as disease models. However, the application of hCOs is precluded by several limitations, including the lack of integration into in vivo circuits that generate behavioral outputs. To overcome these issues, transplantation of hCOs into intact living brains has been proposed.
RNA binding fox-1 homologue 1 (RBFOX1) is a splicing factor that regulates alternative splicing and modulates the expression of several genes involved in brain development, and it is among the top identified loci related to psychiatric disorders.
Psychiatric animal models are a challenge by their nature. Whether a drug is blocking tumor growth in a rodent is easy enough to measure, although still hard to translate. But how does one figure out what a mouse is thinking? Actually, one doesn’t. There is “no way in heck I’m going to claim that I can model a thought disorder in rodents, so forget about that,” Bita Moghaddam told her audience at the opening keynote of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) annual conference this weekend. But other aspects of mental disorders, she argued, can be usefully modeled.
Loss of Paneth cells and their antimicrobial granules has been linked to a compromised intestinal epithelial barrier, which is a hallmark of Crohn’s disease.
Researchers from Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri aimed to characterize lectin pathway (LP) activation after ischemic stroke in a novel humanized mouse model expressing human mannose-binding lectin.
Although targeted therapies are prescribed on the basis of a patient's molecular makeup, they do not work every time. And in those instances where they do work, they basically stop working every time. In response, researchers have developed a number of systems whose goal it is to predict which drugs will be effective for an individual patients.
