Animal Models to Study Fungal Virulence and Antifungal Drugs
Alix T. Coste and Sara Amorim-Vaz
from: Antifungals: From Genomics to Resistance and the Development of Novel Agents (Edited by: Alix T. Coste and Patrick Vandeputte). Caister Academic Press, U.K. (2015) Pages: 289-316.
Abstract
Animal models are crucial tools and a prerequisite for any clinical trials, since both the anatomopathology of an infection and a drug's efficacy/toxicity can only be accurately assessed in vivo before being used in humans. Ideally good animal models are able to closely mimic human diseases and allow analysis of the pathology, pathogen virulence traits, host response patterns, and efficacy of potential treatments. In the world of drug design, animal models are used to determine effective dose, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and toxicity. Unfortunately, the majority of pathogenic fungi have essentially humans as natural hosts, meaning that the perfect animal model does not exist. Optimized models have to be developed depending on the scientific question being addressed, and several animal models often have to be used in order to answer all the questions raised by a biological problem. In addition, several ethical and financial considerations could also affect the choice of the model. In this review we will focus on animal models. They are usefull to assess antifungal drug efficacy and/or resistance and to analyse host-pathogen interaction that aims to determine new drug targets. In this review, we will discuss mammalian models of infection, with mice as being the gold standard as well as alternative non-mammalian models, also called mini-host models. These models range from insects, with Galleria mellonella as gold standard, to single cell hosts such as eggs or amoeba, through vertebrate models such as zebrafish read more ...
