A humanized mouse model to study type 1 diabetes

The clinical management of type 1 diabetes (T1D) faces the lack of fully predictive biomarkers and of antigen-specific therapies to prevent its development. From a therapeutic standpoint, preclinical modls of T1D have fallen short of directly translating into the human. To circumvent this limitation, we developed a new mouse model that is deficient for expression of murine major histocompatibility complex class I, class II and of murine insulin genes and instead expresses HLA-A*02:01, the high susceptibility HLA-DQ8 molecule and human insulin. The metabolic and immune phenotype of these mice is basically identical to that of the parental strains. Upon expression of B7.1 under the control of the rat insulin promoter, these mice develop T1D along with a T-lymphocyte response to human preproinsulin epitopes spanning the whole autoantigen sequence. This new model will allow evaluating peptide-based immunotherapy that may directly apply to human T1D. We analysed 2 YES mice to compare with one NOD mouse and one C57BL/6 mouse as controls. Finaly, we have 4 samples.