Animal Models of Asthma

Abstract

Asthma is a significant heterogeneous disease with a high prevalence in children and adults. The main manifestations of asthma include wheezing, cough, dyspnea, chest tightness, mucus hypersecretion, and airway hyperresponsiveness to inhaled allergens with varying degrees of expiratory airflow limitation. Asthma is mainly considered as a state of dysregulated Th2 immune responses. However, clinical findings indicate that asthma is a heterogeneous disease with diverse phenotypes, endotypes and inflammatory cascades. Animal models are critical to advance insights into the pathophysiology underlying asthma development and to validate the safety and efficacy of novel therapeutics. Allergic asthma is mostly induced in murine models through sensitization of mice by one of the two main allergens: ovalbumin and house dust mite. Murine models were the most used model to investigate immune responses and genetic background of asthma as well as the basis of the heterogenous phenotypes/endotypes of the disease. Murine models have also been used to validate novel therapeutics. While murine models have offered a better understanding of certain pathways and reactants in the pathogenesis of asthma and airway remodeling, none of the current models entirely reflect the same features of human asthma. Therefore, great caution should be considered regarding the extrapolation of data derived from the murine asthma model to human asthma as they have many limitations and only partly reflect the pathology of human diseases.