Characterisation of a murine model of the late asthmatic response.

backgroundThe incidence of asthma is increasing at an alarming rate. While the current available therapies are effective, there are associated side effects and they fail to adequately control symptoms in all patient subsets. In the search to understand disease pathogenesis and find effective therapies hypotheses are often tested in animal models before progressing into clinical studies. However, current dogma is that animal model data is often not predictive of clinical outcome. One possible reason for this is the end points measured such as antigen-challenge induced late asthmatic response (LAR) is often used in early clinical development, but seldom in animal model systems. As the mouse is typically selected as preferred species for pre-clinical models, we wanted to characterise and probe the validity of a murine model exhibiting an allergen induced LAR.

methodsC57BL/6 mice were sensitised with antigen and subsequently topically challenged with the same antigen. The role of Alum

resultsOur data showed that unlike other features of asthma (e.g. cellular inflammation, elevated IgE levels and airway hyper-reactivity (AHR) the LAR required Alum

conclusionTogether we can conclude that this model does feature steroid sensitive, CD4