Chapter 31 - Animal Models of Organ-Specific Autoimmune Disease

Abstract

Understanding why specific organ systems become targets of autoimmune disease is a prerequisite to the design of efficient immunotherapies. As opposed to the often diffuse, multi-organ nature of systemic autoimmune conditions, research into organ-specific diseases is essentially focused on the interaction of the immune system with a specific cell type. In theory, one would expect that this feature would facilitate the search for responsible genes or environmental triggers and, importantly, the identification of druggable pathways. Unfortunately, much still needs to be learned and organ-specific diseases such as type 1 diabetes remain incurable. The availability of suitable animal models has historically dictated the pace of discovery and progress for many human conditions. Animal models today are still considered as physiological tools to mechanistically dissect the interaction between self-reactive immune cells and a given tissue. They are widely used in pre-clinical studies leading up to human trials and therefore deserve our attention. We will discuss here some representative examples of animal models for organ-specific autoimmunity, with an emphasis on how these models resemble or deviate from human disease.