Promoting Autoimmune Diabetes in Non-Human Primates

摘要

Even if an enormous number of therapeutic approaches to cure diabetes have been successfully tested in the NOD mouse -- the genetically diabetes-prone non-obese diabetic mouse strain, whose etio-pathogenesis is widely-held to parallel the one that occurs in humans -- the majority of them simply didn't work in humans. The gap between mice and humans seems to be too large to justify the translation of therapies efficacious in mice directly to human individuals. But, even if the non-human primates (NHP) seem to be the best animal model available for testing new therapeutic protocols of this kind, on the basis of the phylo-genetic similarities between monkeys and humans, we have to consider that only chemically-induced (e.g., via Streptozotocin injections) diabetic recipients can be used to this aim since NHP do not spontaneously develop an autoimmune diabetes. The absence of an autoimmune diabetic monkey model is a major hurdle to properly validate diabetes-specific therapies for a realistic translation to human patients. Given these considerations we thought it necessary to find the means to promote autoimmune diabetes in NHP.