EMBO Practical Course — Humanized mice, personalized therapies and big data

Humanized mouse engraftment models (human immune system and/or human tissue) are an integral part of basic and translational research for the understanding of human diseases and for development of new therapies. The Ebola Virus outbreak has demonstrated the relevance of humanized mouse models for the understanding of emerging diseases and testing new medicines. The same can apply for the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. “Big pharma” and biotech companies include humanized mice in their pre-clinical development portfolio to test efficacy and safety of anti-cancer drugs. These platforms provide researchers and drug developers with human specific targets, physiological pathways and mechanisms of disease not found in traditional mouse models of disease. These aspects of the humanized models allow direct testing of human versus mouse specific therapies enabling more rapid drug development and the generation of more clinically relevant data. During the last decade these models have substantially diverged among laboratories regarding the mouse strains used, mouse handling, analyses techniques and sources of human material. This experimental variability is expected as the field is dynamic and growing rapidly, but the data documentation and reporting should be better standardized for metadata analyses. This course will teach the participants the principles of experimental pre-requisites and harmonized analyses (e.g., flow cytometry, RNA sec and genomic analyses).