Researchers Create Mouse to Fight Inflammatory Diseases

Dr. Salomon Amar, associate dean for research, led a team that created a mouse lacking a key inflammation gene, offering a new approach to treating inflammatory disorders such as arthritis and Crohn’s disease.

The mouse, which is missing the gene to specify the LITAF protein, showed reduced inflammation compared with other mice. The findings appear in a paper, “Macrophage-specific LITAF-deficient mice express reduced LPS-induced cytokine profiling: further evidence for LITAF-dependent LPS signaling pathways,” published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

Drugs currently used to treat inflammatory diseases control inflammation through a different pathway than the pathway discovered by Amar in 2003. “The generation of these animals opens new opportunities for assessing the role of LITAF in inflammation in hopes of designing anti-LITAF drugs for major inflammatory diseases,” says Amar.

The mouse is available for sale to encourage discovery of new drugs to fight inflammatory diseases.